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New Light 



on 



The New Testament 



An account of some interesting 
discoveries which bear important 
testimony as to the time when 
the gospels and other books of 
the New Testament were written. 



/ By 
PARKE P. FLOURNOY, D.D. 

Author of " The Search-Light of Hippolytus " 

INTRODUCTION BY 
PROF. BENJ. B. WARFIELD, D. D., LL. D. 






3135JJ' > »• 9» » 









PHILADELPHIA 

THE WESTMINSTER PRESS 
1903 



Tg5 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS. 

Two Copies Received 

MAR 21 1903 

, Copyright Entry 
CLASS ^ XXc. No. 
COPY 8. 



I 



Copyright, 1903, by the Trustees of 
The Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath- 
School Work. 



Contents 



PAGE 

Prefatory Note v 

Introduction (Prof. Benj^ B. Warfield, D. D., LL. D. ) vii 

CHAPTER I. 
False Lights that Lead Astray 1 

CHAPTER II. 
New Light on a Martyr's Testimony 18 

CHAPTER III. 
The Great Light from the Vatican 47 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai .... 84 

CHAPTER V. 
Twin Lights from Athens Ill 

CHAPTER VI. 
Light from the Land of the Pharaohs .... 136 

CHAPTER VII. 

Many Lights from Many Lands or Light on the 
Setting . . 157 

Appendix 179 

iii 



Prefatory Note 



I WAS encouraged to publish, in the present 
form, the following accounts of discoveries by 
the opinion kindly expressed by Dr. Warfield 
of Princeton Theological Seminary and Dr. 
Hersman of Union Theological Seminary, 
Richmond, Va., of an article published in the 
Presbyterian Quarterly on the three earliest 
apologists. They both urged me to put into 
book form this and other articles on discoveries 
which of late years have made clearer than 
ever the proof of the traditional dates of the 
gospels and other books of the New Testa- 
ment. 

To every reader I would say that I have not 
only found much pleasure in the studies of 
which this little book is the fruit, but have 
been brought to feel more fully than ever be- 
fore the certainty of those things wherein 
we have been instructed about Christ our 
Lord. 

My wish for every reader is that, more 
firmly and joyously than ever before, he may 



VI 



Prefatory Note 



believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of 
God ; and, believing, may have life through 
his name. 

Parke P. Flourimoy. 

The Manse, Bethesda, Md.^ Jan. 21, 1903. 



Introduction 

By Prof. Beis^j. B. Warfield, D. D., LL. D. 
Peinceton Theological Seminary 

The age in which our lot is cast, is an age 
of very eager research. It has had its reward 
in a long list of discoveries in every depart- 
ment of knowledge. Its scientific achieve- 
ments can scarcely be said to have come " with- 
out observation." Its historical and literary 
discoveries have naturally lain a little more 
out of the range of the public view. Even 
some of these, it is true, have been too epocli- 
making to remain hidden. When Dr. Schlie- 
mann's pick dug out Troy from the superin- 
cumbent ages, and at Mycen^ gave us back a 
whole forgotten culture, a thrill went through 
the whole civilized world : the several stages in 
the recovery of the records of the great Meso- 
potamian empires have been watched with 
even intenser interest by even greater multi- 
tudes. Nor can any undue modesty be at- 
tributed to the investigators in these recondite 

vii 



viii Introduction 

fields, leading them to underestimate the im- 
portance of their "finds" or to refrain from 
calling public attention to them. Exploitation 
of the results of research has often been as 
eager as the research itself. A certain kind 
of knowledge of these results has accord- 
ingly become very widespread. Not merely 
has '^ Babel and Bible " become a familiar 
alliteration, but such outlandish names as 
Oxyrhynchus and Akhmim lisp on the lips of 
babes. 

Sometimes this exploitation of results is in 
inverse ratio to the value of the discovery 
proclaimed. Incredible efforts are made to 
give immense significance to the veriest trifles, 
and a deafening clamor is raised over every 
scrap of papyrus dug out of the dust-heaps of 
Egypt. A fragment scarcely two inches 
square containing a sentence from some old 
homily, long, and doubtless very happily, for- 
gotten, is heralded over the world as a portion 
of a " precanonical gospel," with startling in- 
timations of the ruin its discovery is to work 
in the authority of our presently accepted 
gospels. A but little larger fragment con- 
taining a series of exceedingly apocryphal " say- 
ings of Jesus," is sensationally published with 
the grossly misleading title of '' Logia of 



Introduction ix 

Jesus " affixed to it, and the suggestion made 
that we have recovered in it something at 
least very similar to the '^ Logia " which Pa- 
pias attributed to Matthew^, — though this old 
writer certainly meant just our Gospel of 
Matthew by this designation, despite the 
efforts of a certain type of criticism to make 
him mean something else. 

The cognoscenti may smile at such obviously 
despairing attempts at the creation out of 
nothing of support for insupportable theories. 
But what is the uninformed public to think of 
it all ? Ignorant of the real state of affairs, 
and startled out of its indifference by the 
exploitation of such discoveries as these, a 
certain uneasiness is growing up among us, 
and Babylon bids fair to become again a name 
of dread and Egypt a land from whose sands 
may be expected to spring up any day a 
monster to devour us. There is great need 
that some one should tell the people plainly 
and with a sufficient body of illustration w^hat 
have been the real results of the investigations 
of the last quarter of a century, and what is the 
real bearing they have on the documents of 
our faith. It is this service that Dr. Flournoy 
is rendering, first in his excellent Search- 
light of St. Hi])polyt%is published a few 



X Introduction 

years ago, and now again in the present 
volume. 

Paradoxical as it may sound, it is easy both 
to overestimate and to underestimate the impor- 
tance of such discoveries as Dr. Flournoy re- 
counts to us in this interesting narrative. 

It is easy to overestimate their importance. 
It is a very unwholesome state of mind which 
is always groping for " confirmations " of the 
genuineness, trustworthiness or authority of 
our sacred writings. And it is as unjustified 
as it is unwholesome. We have not accepted 
these writings as authentic documents of the 
apostolic age and the infallible word of God, 
on flimsy grounds. We need no new evidence 
to establish them in our confidence. The 
mass and cogency of the evidence already in 
hand is so great, indeed, that it simulates in- 
finity and hardly admits of substantial in- 
crease. Carrying coals to Newcastle is pro- 
verbially unimportant labor. He who is seek- 
ing for new items of evidence, may certainly 
find them, and there is no reason why he 
should not rejoice in them : but it is all very 
much a work of supererogation. 

Even more may perhaps be fitly said. Search 
we never so diligently, we need not expect 
to find anything in itself of palmary impor- 



Introduction xi 

tance. The Christian Church in her course 
through the ages has not dropped out of her 
knowledge the things that made most for her 
stability and peace. Most of the documents 
that have been lost have been lost because 
they were comparatively not much worth 
keeping. Accordingly most of the documents 
that can be found, we could do very w^ell 
without finding. What has been specially 
worth preserving has been, as a rule, specially 
carefully preserved. The enthusiasm of dis- 
covery sometimes leads scholars to talk of 
" revolutions " that are to be wrought by the 
documents they have brought to light. It is 
a perhaps not unnatural illusion. When the 
enthusiasm of discovery cools and normal 
judgment reasserts itself, it will be found that 
the balance hangs at much its old angle. The 
lineaments of the primitive church, drawn 
on the credit of the major documents that 
have been kept in the continuous possession of 
men, will not be much altered on the faith of 
the minor documents that have for a time 
passed out of notice. 

We need only to ask ourselves what impor- 
tant gains for the chief concerns of the faith 
have accrued to us from the most interesting 
of recent discoveries, to perceive clearly how 



xii Introduction 

subordinate a role they must play. What do 
we learn from the Akhmim fragment concern- 
ing the composition or history of our gospels ? 
Practically nothing. What new information 
as to the original form or authority of our 
gospels does the Lewis palimpsest bring us? 
None whatever. What new fact of impor- 
tance do we gain for the early history of the 
gospels in the church from the recovery 
of Tatian's Diatessaron ? Not one. We 
knew before its recovery that the Diatessaron 
was just a harmony of our four gospels; and 
on its recovery it is naturally seen to be just a 
harmony of our four gospels. The absurdity 
of denying it to be just a harmony of our four 
gospels was practically as great before as it is 
after its recovery : and its recovery has not 
rendered it impossible for absurd men to 
continue to perpetrate absurdity. The au- 
thor of Supernatural Religion^ in his new 
edition published last year, still denies the 
Diatessaron to be a simple harmony of our 
gospels : he says the discovered harmony 
is not Tatian's. 

It is really impossible to correct foregone 
conclusions by multiplication of evidence. 
What overwhelming evidence will not ac. 
complish, still more overwhelming evidence 



Introduction 



will no more accomplish. A man submerged 
under a hundred fathoms of water will be 
no more drowned if you make it five hundred. 
Even if somebody should draw out of some 
hiding-place, to-morrow, a complete copy of 
Papias' Expositions of the Oracles of the Lord^ 
which is perhaps the most interesting of very 
early Christian documents yet awaiting re- 
covery, there is no reason to believe that we 
should reap substantial evidential gains from 
its recovery. Anybody who wishes to know, 
can know now what the book was. And any- 
body who wishes absurdly to deny that it was 
what it was, could still deny it, with the book 
in his hand, as reasonably as he can now. 
Those whom suflScient evidence will not con- 
vince, will not be convinced by a resurrec- 
tion from the dead. It is vain to hope that 
the task of Christian Apologetics will be sub- 
stantially lightened by discoveries of this 
kind. The difficulty of the task of Christian 
Apologetics does not arise from insufficiency 
in the evidence it is prepared to offer. It lies 
in a very different quarter. 

But, on the other hand, as we have said, it 
is very easy to underestimate the importance 
of discoveries of this kind. The term '^ im- 
portance " is a relative term, and there needs 



xiv Introduction 

to be asked on each occasion of its employ- 
ment, " Of importance for what ? " Is the 
difference of a thousandth part of an inch be- 
tween two measurements of importance ? 
That depends on what we are measuring and for 
what end. Out in the fields, where we are 
measuring the stone-fence which is to be paid 
for at so much a rod, it is of no importance 
whatever. It is of no importance to the dry- 
goods clerk who is measuring off a dozen 
yards of muslin for a customer's dress. In 
the observatory where the astronomer is 
measuring the parallax of a fixed star, it is, 
however, of the utmost importance. An error 
of this dimension in this measurement is noth- 
ing less than immense. Micrometers are of no 
use whatever in the ordinary concerns of life, 
and the intrusion of them into that sphere 
would not only be an impertinence but an in- 
tolerable nuisance. They nevertheless in 
their own sphere of usefulness possess an im- 
portance that is literally inestimable. 

Somewhat similarly, discoveries in the 
domain of early Christian literature which 
have no importance for the life and faith 
of the Christian Church may yet each have a 
very large importance in the appropriate sphere 
of investigation to which it belongs. The dis- 



Introduction xv 

CO very of the Lewis palimpsest, for example, 
cannot be said to possess any significance for 
the Christian life. But it has high importance 
for the history of the Syriac Bible. Some 
very interesting outstanding questions in that 
sphere of investigation, it goes far toward 
settling ; and it raises some new problems of 
its own which the student finds exceedingly 
interesting and full of meaning. It even has 
some importance, through its significance for 
the history of the Syriac Bible, for the history 
of the text of the New Testament ; and thus 
plays its part in the laborious task of the 
ascertainment of the exact text of the New 
Testament. It is easy to exaggerate the part 
it plays in this great work, and some very 
strange things have been said about it in this 
relation — which, however, can be easily par- 
doned the enthusiasm of discovery. Similarly 
Tischendorf, when he found the great Codex 
Sinaiticus, in the first flush of exhilaration 
lost temporarily the balance of his judgment 
and was inclined to treat it as the decisive 
witness to the New Testament text. He even 
published an edition of his New Testament in 
which the readings of the new codex were 
given preponderating authority. A very few 
years sufliced to correct his error and to re- 



XVI Introduction 



adjust the relative values of the witnessing 
documents more equitably. 

What we need most particularly to bear in 
mind, however, is that in all matters of this 
kind we are in a region in which measure- 
ments are taken with a micrometer. When 
we speak of things important and unimpor- 
tant for textual criticism, for instance, we 
are talking in terms of a scale of measure- 
ments which has no application and no 
meaning in the domain of common life. 
There is no extant text of the New Testa- 
ment that is not abundantly pure for our 
ordinary use, as we strive to build ourselves 
up in our most holy faith, and to furnish our- 
selves completely unto every good work. But 
the textual critic operates with other stand- 
ards, and to him it is a matter of importance 
which of two prepositions meaning " from " is 
used in a given passage or how an aorist verb 
is spelled,— whether after the so-called " Alex- 
andrian " fashion with an " a," or after the so- 
called '' Classical " style, with an " o." It is 
of high importance for him, investigating such 
things, to ascertain what was the type of 
Greek text that underlies the earliest Syriac 
translation; and as the Lewis palimpsest 
helps him notably in this investigation, it ap- 



Introduction xvii 

peals to liim as a highly important dis- 
covery. 

Similarly measured by the micrometer of 
detailed investigation, each new discovery in 
the domain of earlv Christendom has its own 
high value. Do we wish, for example, to work 
out the history of the subterraneous literature 
of primitive Christianity, — the literature that 
represented in that time the publications in 
our day of Dowieism and Christian Science 
and Mormonism ? To the student in this de- 
partment of research, the Akhmim fragment, 
the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, and the like, com- 
mend themselves as most important discover- 
ies. Do we wish to work out the detailed 
history of the conflict of early Christianity 
with the civil authorities, in its effort to make 
standing room for itself in the world ? Then 
the discovery of Aristides' Apology will ap- 
peal to us as of quite exceptional importance. 
Are our studies given to tracing out the his- 
tory of the comparative study of the gospels ? 
Then the recovery of the text of Tatian's har- 
mony, even in a translated and somewhat re- 
vised shape, will be hailed by us as of the ut- 
most value. 

Of course no department of Christian study, 
any more than any Christian himself, stands 



xviii Introduction 

off to itself in isolation from all other depart- 
ments. Each works in with all the others 
in the complex activity of tbe Christian 
scholarship of the day, as it strives to perfect 
its multiform task of thoroughly exploring the 
history of the founding and growth of our re- 
ligion in the world. What is important for 
any one of them, therefore, is through it im- 
portant for the total which their sum makes 
up ; and, through it, for the whole intellectual 
life of organized Christianity. Accordingly, 
the intelligent Christian sympathetically feels 
the importance of each and everything that 
any Christian worker in any sphere of investi- 
gation finds important for his work. Only we 
must guard ourselves from transmuting its 
relative importance into an absolute impor- 
tance, under a different scale of measurements, 
and thus coming to fancy that in some way 
Christianity itself hangs on it. 

This is not to say that these discoveries have 
no apologetical value. It is to say that it is im- 
portant that their apologetical value should be 
truly estimated. For this, it is necessary to re- 
mind ourselves of the real apologetical situation. 
This, as has been already hinted, is the precise 
opposite of apologetical dearth. The constant 
conflict that necessarily reigns in a depart- 



Introduction xix 

ment the very function of which is conflict, is 
the result of the continual repetition of the 
following process. Some thinker, unwilling 
to believe in the supernatural character and 
origin of Christianity, as evinced in the evi- 
dence marshaled by the apologist, asks him- 
self how he can reconstruct the factors that 
entered into the origin and development of 
Christianity so as to present it as a natural 
product. He carefully constructs for himself 
a hypothetical history of its origin and growth 
with the omission of all supernatural factors, 
seeking to rearrange the facts of history so as 
to permit this. In doing so he comes into re- 
peated conflict with the facts as witnessed by 
the testimony in hand. He is thus led arti- 
ficially to manipulate this testimony, in order 
to escape the supernaturalistic implication. 
Thus he builds up an elaborate structure, on 
which not only the most wide and accu- 
rate learning but shining talents and often 
genius itself have been expended. In the 
process, he has, for example, plausibly ex- 
plained away all the evidence that Tatian's 
Diatessaron was a harmony of our four gospels : 
suggesting a doubt here, intruding a brilliant 
conjecture there, presenting a new interpreta- 
tion there, and so manipulating the whole that 



XX Inty^oduction 

his readers are almost ready to disbelieve the 
testimony of their own eyes and accept in- 
stead this fairy-tale as truth. Then Tatian's 
Diatessaron suddenly turns up and clears the 
atmosphere. Nothing really new has been 
discovered. It was perfectly well known be- 
fore just what the Diatessaron was. But 
men's confused minds have been clarified ; all 
the plausible reasoning by which they were in 
danger of being deceived is swept away ; and 
things are allowed to fall back into their old 
and proper places. 

Now just this process has been going on 
over and over again, until it has become a 
classical remark that every new discovery 
drives a new nail into the coffin of critical 
unbelief. The metaphor is a peculiarly happy 
one. It implies that critical unbelief is al- 
ready, rightly viewed, dead and safely encof- 
fined : and it takes note that the progress of 
research has only been steadily driving su- 
perfluous nail after superfluous nail into the 
lid. That lid must be pretty nearly all nails 
by now. 

It is, however, not nearly so widely known 
as it ought to be that this is the precise state 
of the case. And it is just here that these ex- 
cellent books of Dr. Flournoy's have their 



Introduction xxi 

function. They come forward to tell the busy 
Christian who has had little time to inform 
himself at first-hand of the real condition of 
affairs, precisely how things really are. It is 
a very important service that Dr. Flournoy is 
thus rendering the Church: and he is doing it 
admirably. We owe him our thanks for it ; 
and we accord them to him most heartily. 

Princeton, February 1, 1903. 



I. 

FALSE LIGHTS THAT LEAD ASTRAY 

I. The Old French Teacher and His 
Startling Assertion 

In Eichmond, Yirginia, for many years be- 
fore the Civil War, there stood, or more prop- 
erly, sat, a rather strange-looking, one-storied, 
wooden building, with a little sign over the 
door, on which were inscribed, if I remember 
aright, the words, " Select Classical School." 
In it was to be found during the day, except at 
mealtimes, and even before day and late into 
the night, an indefatigable worker — a rather 
short, muscular man of peculiar appearance 
and manners. He was one of that army of 
teachers from New England that invaded the 
South long before the cry " On to Richmond " 
was raised by an army of a very different kind. 
The South owes a great debt of gratitude to 
these teachers, who side bv side with those 
educated in southern colleges and universities, 
did the great work of dispensing the priceless 

1 



2 New Light on the New Testament 

benefits of preparatory education in advance 
of the organization of a public-school system. 

This one was a good, earnest, Christian man. 
He had his faults, no doubt (and who of us has 
not some of his own ?), but, except for some in- 
firmities — or the opposite — of temper, David 
Turner lived for thirty or forty years in Kich- 
mond an unusually blameless and eminently 
useful life. The scholars who went from his 
school to the University of Virginia, there to 
attain to the degree of A. M., and thence to 
Germany, whence they returned with Ph. D. 
added to their names, were his pride ; and he 
never failed to keep the eyes of those under his 
ferule on the noble heights which these heroes 
had gained. There must be many elderly men, 
reared in Richmond during those years, w4io 
remember with gratitude the earnest exhorta- 
tions and careful training of this faithful 
teacher. 

In the modern language department of this 
school there presided, during certain hours of 
the day, an old Frenchman, Monsieur Michard, 
no less remarkable in appearance and other 
characteristics than his chief. He was a wiz- 
ened, wrinkled mite of a man, looking, as he 
went out of the door on a March day, wrap- 
ping his old surtout about his emaciated form, 



False Lights That Lead Astray 3 

as if the wind would actually take him up and 
blow him away like the last leaf of autumn. 
He had been a lawyer, long ago, in Lyons, he 
told us ; and for political reasons, had found it 
convenient, if not absolutely necessary, to leave 
his native land. Conversation was by no 
means forbidden in the modern language room 
when the lesson was through with before the 
hour was out, and M. Michard did not disdain 
to regale the inquiring minds of his pupils with 
other things besides the French and Spanish 
languages v\^hich he had to teach them. He 
was a Eoman Catholic, and as often happens 
in the case of educated men in that communion, 
there was in him the strange combination of a 
certain kind of devoutness with skepticism. 

One day he astonished at least one of his 
pupils by saying, in effect, that the New Tes- 
tament could hardly be a divine revelation, be- 
cause, as he asserted, besides the writings of 
which it was composed, there were perhaps a 
hundred others about as good as those which 
had been collected and made into the New 
Testament. 

Providentially, an antidote was at hand. 
Richmond was favored with the ministry of 
the gifted and devoted Dr. Thomas Yerner 
Moore at that time, and the troubled pupil 



4 New Light on the New Testament 

found, under his ministry, a great deliverance 
from a terrible fate through the gospel con- 
tained in that very New Testament on which 
the old teacher had cast these aspersions. He 
felt that it must be of God, as it brought that 
help in dire extremity which nothing else 
could furnish, and which nothing else had the 
slightest tendency to furnish. The conviction 
he had was like that of the starving man when 
food has been brought to save his life and he 
has felt its reviving and sustaining power from 
the first morsel he has taken. Finding, by his 
own experience, this gospel to be '' the power 
of God unto salvation," he could not help be- 
lieving that the book containing it was of 
God. 

This incident, however, has caused that pupil 
of the old Frenchman to take a deep interest 
in several recent discoveries which have shown 
very clearly the falsity of the old man's asser- 
tion and of the implication contained in it. 

His feeling, on coming to know, in later life, 
of the evidence from early Christian literature 
that this assertion had only a specious basis in 
the existence from an earlier or later time of a 
large number of "pious frauds " going under 
the general name of New Testament Apoc- 
rypha, which were never universally received 



False Lights That Lead Astray 5 

by the tlhurch as inspired, was one of relief. 
When, in more recent years, discoveries were 
made which completely vindicated the genuine- 
ness of the New Testament writings, and es- 
pecially the four gospels, his feeling was like 
what that of a son might be whose father had 
died under false accusations — which he could 
not disprove, though absolutely sure from his 
knowledge of his father's character that they 
were false — when, among that father's papers 
he had found the full proof of his innocence 
and could publish it to the world. 

II. Haeckel a]^d the Gospels 

The assertion of M. Michard about the selec- 
tion of the New Testament books from a large 
number of similar writings was probably based 
on a story which has long been a favorite ar- 
ticle of the stock-in-trade of infidels who make 
pretensions to learning, and which has been 
repeated in various forms in a large number of 
publications. A version of it may be found in 
the Ame7'ican Review of Reviews of only a 
few years ago, in an article entitled " How the 
Bible Came Down to Us," and one meets with 
it in the most unexpected places. Opening 
the recent work of Professor Haeckel, of Ber- 
lin, the corypheus of the host of atheistic evo- 



6 New Light on the New Testament 

lutionists who have made so much unmelodious 
noise in the world — and about the world — for 
the last half century and more, I was surprised 
to find the great scientist repeating the absurd 
story in the pages of his Riddle of the Uni- 
verse. This is his version of it (p. 311 ) : "As 
to the four canonical gospels, we now know 
that they were selected from a host of contra- 
dictory and forged manuscripts of the first 
three centuries by the three hundred and 
eighteen bishops who assembled at the council 
of Nicasa in 327 [sic]. The entire list of gos- 
pels numbered forty, and the canonical list 
contains four. As the contending and mu- 
tually abusive bishops could not agree about 
the choice, they determined to leave the selec- 
tion to a miracle. They put all the books (ac- 
cording to the Synodicon of Pappus), together 
underneath the altar, and prayed that the un- 
canonical books, of human origin, might re- 
main there, and the genuine inspired books 
might be miraculously placed on the table of 
the Lord. And that, says tradition, occurred ! 
The three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark 
and Luke — all written after them, and not by 
them, at the beginning of the second century, 
and the very different Fourth Gospel (ostensibly 
" after " John, written about the middle of the 



" False Lights That Lead Astray 7 

second century) leaped upon the table and were 
thenceforth recognized as the inspired (with 
their thousand mutual contradictions) founda- 
tions of Christian doctrine." He then goes on 
with sarcastic and violent raillery at Christians 
who could be so senseless as to believe in the 
uncouth miracle. 

Now if before printing this nonsense, 
Haeckel had been prudent enough to go to 
some one well-informed about such matters — 
to Prof. Adolf Harnack, in the theological 
department of the great Berlin University, for 
instance — and tell him of it, he would probably 
have said, had politeness allowed, something 
like this : — 

'*My venerable friend, it would be wisest 
for us to confine ourselves to our own depart- 
ments of investigation, as it is best for the 
shoemaker to stick to his last. Had I gone to 
you and told you that through scientific dis- 
coveries in this universe, of which vou seem 
to have solved the riddle, ' vfe now know' that 
the moon is made of green cheese, and must, 
therefore, of course, be inhabited, I should 
not have made myself more ridiculous than 
you would make yourself by publishing this. 
For, in the first place, there is no evidence 
that the Council of Nice did anything at all in 



8 New Light on the New Testament 

the way of settling the Canon of Scripture. 
The story you repeat is a baseless mediaeval 
legend. ^ In the second place, abundant 
quotations in Irenaeus from the four gospels 
as well as distinct statements on the subject, 
show that the four gospels were as fully 
accepted in the year two hundred, as the only 
inspired accounts of our Saviour's life on 
earth, as they are now ; while Justin Martyr 
shows by his quotations from these '' Memoirs 
of the Apostles " as he calls them, that the 
case was just the same more than fifty years 
earlier. Besides this, we now have, by recent 
discovery, the four gospels wrought into a 
continuous account in Tatian's Diatessaron 
{i. ^., through four), the very name of which 
shows that there were but four gospels recog- 

^ ''There is Dot the slightest evidence that the Council of 
Nice had anything whatever to do vrith settling the Canon 
of the New Testament. It was not called for any such pur- 
pose ; nothing relating to the subject appears in the canons 
or acts of the council ; no writer of the fourth, or fifth, or 
sixth, or seventh, or eighth century has even hinted that the 
matter came before the council in any way." — Dr. Ezra 
Abbot. 

The story was published by John Pappus, of Strasburg, at 
the beginning of the 17th century, from an anonymous 
manuscript which mentioned events occurring in A. D. 869, 
"500 years after the members of the Nicene council were 
dead and buried," as one has well said, and is a companion 
piece of many such monkish stories of uncouth miracles. It 
may be found republished in Fabricius' Bibliotheca Grxca^ 
Vol. XI., p. 198. 



False Lights That Lead Astray 9 

nized, JBfty years after the death of the Apostle 
John ; and by necessary implication, there had 
been no others thus recognized by the Chris- 
tian Church. Besides all this, we now have 
the four gospels in Syriac, complete, with the 
exception of a few pages lost out of the manu- 
script, earlier still than this Diatessaron^ as is 
thought, because the i)m^(^55a/'(97i contains many 
of its peculiar readings. It would be best, 
dear friend, for you to go on solving universe 
riddles and leave these matters to persons who 
have some information about early Chris- 
tianity." 

Professor Haeckel's mistake is due to his 
ignorance of the fact that the positions of the 
famous Tubingen School,^ so boldly maintained 
by unbelieving scholars till twenty-five years 
ago, have been made absolutely untenable by 
recent discoveries ; and now, no one who is in- 
formed on the subject can believe either in the 
late origin of any of the four gospels, or in the 
universal acceptance, at any time, of any of 
the many heretical gospels so-called. The 
Gospel of Peter '^^ so-called, fragments of which 

^Haeckel, while modifying Baur's dates, emphasizes his 
conclusions as to the spuriousness of the gospels 

2 See Ante-Niceue Fathers, IX. Vol., pp. 3-31. Harnack 
assigns it to the first quarter of the second century. Other 
scholars place it later. 



10 New Light on the New Testament 

were discovered a few years ago at Akhmim, 
in Egypt, seems to be a Docetic document, de- 
pendent on, and in its main structure, patterned 
after, our gospels. Tiie Apocryphal Gospel 
according to the Hebrews ^ which, possibly, 
originated still earlier than that of Peter,^ was 
used by the heretical sects of the Ebionites, and 
IsTazarenes and shows plainly, in the twenty- 
three quotations from it which are extant, de- 
pendence on all four of our gospels.^ So it 
comes about that these, the two oldest, ap- 
parently, of all the false gospels that are 
known, when closely examined, become wit- 
nesses for the four gospels instead of competi- 
tors with them.^ 



^ Dr. Theodor Zahn says, (Einleitung, I. p. 8). ''The so- 
called Gospel according to the Hebrews was an Aramaic book 
the existence of which is attested from the middle of the 
second century/' and on p. 261. '* The Nazarenes who kept 
true to their mother speech, had from A. D. 150 at the latest, 
their gospel according to the Hebrews." In his History of 
the Canon, II. p. 722, after summing up the evidence and 
speaking of the period about A. D. 130-150, he says, "To 
this time the origin of ih^ Gospel according to the Hebrews 
belongs. ' ' For these references I am indebted to the kind- 
ness of Dr. B. B. Warfield. 

2 See Dr. B. Weiss' Manual of Introd, to N. T., Vol. II. 
? 45, 5. 

^ It is hardly necessary even to mention the little known 
Gospel ace. to the Egyptians, a Gnostic document, but one by 
no means generally accepted by the Gnostics themselves, 
and distinctly repudiated by Clem, of Alexandria, who 
quotes it. 



False Lights That Lead Astray 11 

It is instructive to look back over the course 
through which the Tubingen School has passed 
to its downfall, leaving so much spiritual wreck 
and ruin behind it in the overturning of the 
faith of many, during the past half century. 
The founder of this school of theological 
speculation was Ferdinand Christian Baur. 
Baur was withdrawn from the orthodox posi- 
tion, which his earliest productions indicate 
that he held, by the powerful influence of 
Schleiermacher, and then by that of Strauss, his 
own pupil, whose '' Life of Jesus " seems to 
have been one of the means by which poor 
George Eliot was robbed of her faith. But 
the chief influence which drew him aside was 
Hegel's philosophy. We need not examine at 
length the course of his reasoning. Little 
more is necessary than the mention of his 
conclusions about -the time when the different 
books of the New Testament were written. 
He held that Paul Avrote the four epistles, to 
the Komans, Corinthians and Galatians, and 
that John, the beloved disciple, wrote the 
Apocalypse ; but that the other books of the 
New Testament are spurious productions, and 
especially that the four gospels containing the 
facts which are the basis of Christianity were 
written long after their reputed authors, 



12 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were dead; 
and that they, therefore, could not have been 
written by them. This conclusion was 
founded, hot upon facts, but upon a priori 
theories. Taking the opposite course from 
that of the Baconian method of deducing gen- 
eral conclusions from an induction of particular 
facts, he assumed certain general conclusions as 
true, and then proceeded to gather and arrange 
facts in the endeavor to sustain these con- 
clusions. Assuming the impossibility of mira- 
cles, and of the supernatural in all its phases, 
and then adopting the Hegelian theory of the 
progress of every set of opinions, as going 
through the three stages of affirmation, con- 
tradiction and reconciliation (thesis, anti-thesis, 
and synthesis), he endeavored to account for 
the origin of the Christian Scriptures by 
supposing that they developed in a merely 
natural way by this rule. 

The process, however, is of small importance. 
What we are concerned with is his conclusions 
as to the dates of these books, and especially of 
the four gospels. Placing these four epistles 
of Paul in this period of " affirmation," he pro- 
nounced them genuine and their traditional 
dates substantially correct. But, according to 
his theory, the so-called Synoptic Gospels, 



False Lights That Lead Astray 13 

Matthew, Mark and Luke, must have origi- 
nated in the second period — that of discussion 
"and difference. So he concluded that while 
Matthew may have been written about A. D. 
130, in the interest of the Judaizing party, and 
Luke about 150 in advocacy of universality, 
Mark could not have originated earlier than 
the decade from 150 to 160, and that John 
must have been written in the period of " syn- 
thesis " or reconciliation of opposing parties, 
in the decade extending from a. d. 160 to 170. 

III. "SUPERIS^ATUEAL EeLIGION " 

Now, it would not have been necessary to 
detain the reader with the mention of these 
opinions of Baur if they had been held by 
him alone ; but this was by no means the 
case. His views spread rapidly among Ger- 
man scholars, and the very influential Tubin- 
gen School was the result. Baur died in 1860, 
and his influence has long since waned in Ger- 
many, as its radical unsoundness has been 
demonstrated, not only by reasoning, but by 
unexpected events. But, as its sun was going 
down in Germany, it was rising on England. 
About twenty-five years ago there appeared in 
England a book dealing with these questions 



14 New Light on the New Testament 

in an apparently learned way under the title 
of Supernatural Religion, 

The aim of the book was to destroy belief 
in the supernatural, and especially to discredit 
the four gospels. It was a popular presenta- 
tion in English of the Tubingen theories of 
Baur and his school. The author withheld his 
name and seems never to have revealed it, 
though a prominent English review writer has 
been suspected of the authorship.^ The book 
was ushered in with a chorus of praise from 
reviews, extolling its great learning and fair- 
ness in discussion. It was at a time when the 
Darwinian theories were most zealously prop- 
agated, and a large proportion of the most 
cultivated Englishmen were under the spell of 
the skepticism which accompanied the recep- 
tion of these theories. The result was that 
the book had an enormous sale, passing rapidly 
from one edition to another, and influenced a 
very large number of writers and readers in 
such a way as to lead them, at least, to ques- 
tion the divine origin of the Christian religion 
and the sacred character of the Holy Scrip- 
tures. One thing which, without doubt, added 



1 It is now weU known that Mr. Walter E. Cassells is the 
author of this book, a new edition of which has just ap- 
peared. 



I 



False Lights That Lead Astray 15 

greatly to the popularity of this book with its 
skeptical readers was the fact that it, some- 
how, came to be understood that the anony- 
mous author was one of the most eminent 
prelates of the Church of England ; a man 
noted for his profound and accurate scholar- 
ship and unswerving faithfulness to his sacred 
duties during a long life of usefulness. 
Whether this fiction was given out by the un- 
known author or by some literary Mephistophe- 
les among his admirers will probably never 
be known. But the result may, perhaps, be 
better im^agined than described. This more 
than '' dash of heresy " in the supposed pro- 
duction of a bishop long venerated for his 
learning and piety, gave the dish a piquancy 
whose charm was irresistible to the palate of 
the skeptical public, ready at all times, and 
more than ready at that time, of the beginning 
of the Darwinian ascendancy, to break away 
from all the old restraints of religion. The 
fact that a man of such character, standing 
and ability, who had so long been one of the 
Church's guides and defenders, had now, as it 
seemed, joined the sappers and miners who 
w^ere trying to destroy her foundations, and 
that this whilom eminent defender, had, in 
this work, set off a blast which made the 



New Light on the New Testament 



whole edifice tremble, filled the free-thinking 
literati with an excitement from whose intoxi- 
cation they have hardly yet recovered. The 
sadly wronged prelate did indeed most em- 
phatically disclaim the authorship, bat this 
seemed of no avail. The book is said to have 
passed through six editions in as many months. 
This is probably an exaggeration ; but the fact 
that the assertion is made is an indication that 
the circulation of the book must have been 
rapid beyond precedent in the case of a work 
devoted to learned argument on such a subject. 
The book which was lauded by four reviews 
for its fairness and directness in argument was 
very soon found, on examination by competent 
scholars, to conceal, under the guise of vaunted 
fairness, almost every kind of indirection and 
unfair dealing. Dr. Lightfoot (afterwards 
Bishop of Durham) convicted the author of so 
misrepresenting and warping the facts with 
which he dealt as to show an unmistakably 
dishonest intention to "make the worse the 
better reason seem." The utter misrepresenta- 
tion of the meaning of authorities quoted, 
whether made from ignorance or design, indi- 
cated a prejudice against the Christian religion 
which made the author blind to whatever was 
evidential of its truth and lynx-eyed to the 



False Lights That Lead Astray 17 

minutest fact that could be construed as un- 
favorable to it. Dr. Sanday, of Oxford, 
showed so conclusively the fallaciousness of 
the writer's argument designed to prove that 
the Gospel of Luke was derived from the 
mutilated gospel which Marcion used in prop- 
agating his heresy, that he was forced to ac- 
knowledge that the Gospel of Luke was the 
original which, on the other hand, Marcion 
trimmed and treated to make it appear to sup- 
port his heresy. 

Dr. Lightfoot, in a remarkable set of articles 
in the Contemporary Review^ proved that the 
supposedly learned and fair author of Super - 
natural Religion^ either from the lack of even 
a schoolboy knowledge of Greek, or from de- 
sign, mistranslated passage after passage, from 
Irenseus especially, so as to make it appear 
that the author intended to teach exactly the 
reverse of that which, on a proper translation 
and construction of his words, was shown to 
be his real meaning. 



11. 

NEW LIGHT OlSr A MARTYE's TESTIMOISTY 

I. Tatian's Diatessaeon 

The main position around which this great 
battle raged was The Diatessaron of Tatian. 

The author of Supernatural Religion ven- 
tured to assert that " No one seems to have 
seen Tatian's Harmony^ probably for the rea- 
son that there was no such work." Could he 
have foreknown the events of the near future, 
he would have withheld this sarcasm. 

During the very next year, 1876, there ap- 
peared a translation of Ephrasm's Commen- 
tary on Tatian's Diatessaron^ made at the 
request of the Mechitarist Fathers of San 
Lazzaro, Yenice, by Dr. Georgius Moesinger, of 
the University of Salzburg.^ The author of 
Supernatural Religion^ in spite of this, which 
was a very clear proof of the existence of 
Tatian's Harmony^ said in desperation: "It 
is obvious that there is no evidence of any 

^ This translation was based on an earlier Latin version of 
the Mechitarist monk, Aucher. 

18 



New Light on a Martyr'' s Testimony 19 
value connecting Tatian's gospel with those of 



our canon." 



This he did in 1879, and he most certainly 
would not have said it if he could have fore- 
seen what was to occur two years later. In 
1881 Professor Zahn, of Erlangen, published a 
reconstruction of the Diatessaron of Tatian 
from Moesinger's translation of the commen- 
tary on it, and from the Homilies of Ajphraates 
which were, also, based upon it. This made it 
clear that the Diatessaron was not another of 
the Apocryphal gospels, nor a reproduction of 
the Gospel acGording to the Ilehrews^ as had 
been conjectured, but was a harmony made up 
of our four gospels. 

This work of Zahn drew attention to an 
Arabic manuscript marked No. XIY, in the 
Vatican library, which purported to contain a 
translation of the Diatessaron itself. 

Ciasca, a " lector " of the library, was urged 
to translate this manuscript and publish it, but 
was delayed by other duties in doing so, and 
this providential delay was overruled, like 
many another, for the best result in the end. 
There was in the library one day an ecclesi- 
astic, the Visitor Apostolic of the Catholic 
Copts in Egypt. He was invited to examine 
the manuscript, and as a result, informed 



20 New Light on the New Testament 

Ciasca that he knew of another like it in 
Egypt, and that he would have it sent to him. 
In due time this was done, and thus Ciasca 
had two Arabic copies from which to make his 
translation. He completed and published his 
translation in 1888, in time to present it to the 
Pope on the occasion of his jubilee in that 
year. Now we have it in English in a transla- 
tion with notes by the Eev. Hope W. Hogg, 
B. D., and his wife, who gave him much assist- 
ance in the undertaking, as well as an earlier 
by B. Haralyn Hill, B. D., called The Earliest 
Life of Christ 

Two facts make it of great importance as a 
witness for the four gospels. One is that it 
contains the whole account given of our Sav- 
iour's life and teachings in the gospels, in the 
very words of the gospels, woven together so 
as to make a continuous narrative, and is 
therefore appropriately named the Diatessaron^ 
i. ^., through four. 

The second fact is that there is no trace of 
any Apocryphal gospel in it, showing that the 
only gospels recognized by the Christians of 
that early day, fifty or sixty years after the 
death of the last of the apostles, were those 
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The 
preparation of a life of our Saviour out of 



New Light on a Martyr'' s Testimony 21 

these gospels, and these alone, Avithout a word 
of his own (as Ebed Jesu puts it, '' and of his 
own he did not add a single saying ") indicates 
the universal acceptance of these gospels long 
before, as well as the reverential awe enter- 
tained of them as " The memoirs of the apos- 
tles," as Tatian's teacher, Justin Martyr, called 
them. This is too evident to need amplifica- 
tion or argument. 

The Diatessaron^ according to the careful 
estimate made by Prof. G. F. Moore, con- 
tains fifty per cent of Mark, sixty-six per 
cent of Luke, 76.5 per cent of Matthew and 
ninety-six per cent of John. Before the dis- 
covery of the Diatessaron^ the Rev. W. M. 
Taylor, D. D., of New York, composed a har- 
mony of the same character, which he named 
The Life of Our Lord in the Words of the 
Four Evangelists^ a book which was constantly 
used for daily reading by one whose memory 
is more precious to the writer than that of any 
other human being ; and it would be as irra- 
tional to deny that Dr. Taylor ^ had our four 
gospels before him when he arranged that 
harmony, as to say that Tatian did not have 
them w^hen he wove them together to make 
his. Duplicate expressions and narratives in 

^ Dr. Taylor omits the genealogies, just as Tatian does. 



22 New Light on the New Testament 

the different gospels were, of course, omitted 
by both in a work of such a character. 

The composition of the Diatessaron implies 
that the four gospels were the only gospels of 
the Christians for a long time before it came 
into existence, in spite of the efforts of Basil- 
ides, Marcion, and other heretics to corrupt or 
supplant them. 

But an interesting question is, are there 
traces of the existence of these gospels during 
the period which lies between the death of 
John and the composition of the Diatessaron ? 
This period, as every student of church history 
is aware, lies in great obscurity. AVhether 
from the destruction of libraries, the preva- 
lence of persecution or whatever cause, the 
distinct Christian memorials of that time are 
few. Indeed this may be said of the time 
from the close of The Acts of the Apostles to 
the death of the Apostle John, also. Yet 
there are lights here and there in this dark 
morass where the paths are so indistinct and 
our footing so uncertain. I need not speak of 
the clear evidence of the existence of the four 
gospels and other books of the New Testament 
furnished b}^ the fragments of the writings of 
apostolic fathers which have been preserved to 
our time. For these testimonies the reader 



New Light on a Martyr's Testimony 23 

will turn to such text-books on Christian evi- 
dences as that of Paley, or to the much fuller 
and fresher presentation of them in the almost 
phenomenal production of the great German 
scholar. Dr. Bernhardt Weiss, Manual of In- 
troduction to the New Testament : ^ or to the 
still better and sounder presentation in Char- 
teris's Canonicity, 

But in addition to the references to these 
writings in the scanty Christian literature 
which has survived from the apostolic age to 
our own, we have the account of a thoroughly 
reliable writer, who lived from about twenty 
years after the death of the Apostle John to 
the opening of the third century, of oral com- 
munications which he had received from one 
who was a disciple of John himself, and was 
accustomed to talk with others who had seen 
the Lord ; and he tells us that these communi- 
cations by word of mouth agreed with the 
accounts of Christ given in the gospels. This 
testimony of IrenaGus is contained in a letter 
to a friend of his youth, who with him had 
been a hearer of Polycarp, the younger con- 
temporary of the Apostle John, but who seems 



^ As remarkable, however, for the lameness and impotency 
of some of its conclusions as it is for its evidence of scholar- 
ship and diligent research. 



2.4 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

to have fallen away from the smiplicity of the 
gospel under the influence of political ambi- 
tions and heathen philosophy. Writing to 
this former companion, Florinus, Irenasus 
says : — 

" I distinctly remember the incidents of that 
time better than events of recent occurrence ; 
for, the lessons received in childhood, growing 
with the soul, become identified with it; so 
that I can describe the very place in which 
the blessed Pol3^carp used to sit when he dis- 
coursed, and his goings out and his comings 
in, and his manner of life, and his personal ap- 
pearance, and the discourses which he held 
before the people, and how he would describe 
his intercourse with John, and with the rest 
who had seen the Lord, and how he would re- 
late their words. And whatsoever things he 
had heard from them about the Lord, and 
about his miracles, and about his teaching, 
Polycarp, as having received them from eye- 
witnesses of the life of the word, would 
relate altogether in accordance with the Scrip- 
tures!^'^ 

Of this, Dr. Wace {The Authenticity of the 
Four Gospels) remarks : — 

"In order to appreciate what this involves, 
one must ask what Irenaeus meant by ' The 



New Light on a 3Iartyr^s Testimony 25 

Scriptures.' Of course, the expression must 
refer to those portions of the Scriptures which 
narrate the life of our Lord, and Iren^us has 
stated, in a memorable passage, what these 
records were. In the third book of his great 
work on The Refxitation and Overthrow of 
Knowledge Falsely so Galled^ he relates briefly, 
says Bishop Lightfoot : ' The circumstances 
under which the four gospels were written. 
. . . He assumes throughout, not only 
that our four canonical gospels alone were 
acknowledged in the church in his own time, 
but that this had been so from the beginning.' " 
Irenasus, who quotes our four gospels 500 
times in those of his writings which have been 
preserved, and the Gospel of John 100 times, 
was a contemporary, for perhaps thirty-five 
years, of Polycarp, whose memory as his 
teacher he ever held in most affectionate rev- 
erence. Polycarp was the contemporar}'^ of 
the Apostle John for thirty years at the least. 
Irenaeus regarded the four gospels just as the 
orthodox Christian of our day does. Now, 
Irenaeus has much to say of Justin and his 
child in the gospel, Tatian. They lived for 
thirty years in one case, and perhaps forty in 
the other as his contemporaries. Tatian and 
Justin were contemporaries of Polycarp for the 



26 New Light on the New Testament 

first forty or forty-five years of their lives.^ The 
Diatessaron of Tatian frees the testimony of 
Justin Martyr of all possible doubt, and to 
that testimony our attention will now be 
directed. The Diatessaron has been well- 
named 'Hhe key to Justin." 

11. JusTiis^, THE Apologist and Martyr 

Somewhere about the time when the Apos- 
tle John died at Ephesus, there was born at 
the village of Sychar, by Jacob's well, where 
our Saviour told the Samaritan woman of the 
water of life, a child who was to be known 
through all coming ages as a martyr for his 
cause. But, Justin Martyr, though a native of 
Sychar, was not of Samaritan blood. Had we 
no information to the contrary, we should be 
likely to think that he was probably a de- 
scendant of some one of those with whom our 
Lord spent two days on his journey northward 

^ "Polycarpwas eighty-six years old at the time of his 
death (from his words it would seem that he had been 
eighty-six years a Christian) and Irenseus speaks of him as a 
disciple of John, and as appointed Bishop of Smyrna by 
apostles, and again speaks of 'successors of Polycarp at the 
present time,' that is, from A. D. 177 to A. D. 190. . . . 
Living from A. D. 70 to 155, his life and work link together 
St. John and Irenseus, and they become an argument for the 
authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, the force of which it 
is impossible to deny." — Waikins^ Bampton Lectures, pp. 
391, 2. 



New Light on a Martyr s Testimony 2T 

— two days of surpassing interest they must 
have been — when, after hearing his wonderful 
words, they said to the woman of Samaria : 
" Now we believe, not because of thy saying 
for we have heard him ourselves, and know 
that this is indeed the Christ." But it is evi- 
dent from all that he says that he was not of 
Samaritan or of Jewish blood, and that he was 
reared in the study of philosophy and Greek lit- 
erature, and without any knowledge of the Old 
Testament. Philosophy was his pursuit from 
his youth, and he early won the right to wear the 
philosopher's cloak. He seems to have been 
in the habit of retiring to some solitude to do 
what almost every great thinker has done — 
meditate, and commune with nature. It was 
such an excursion that was made, in God's 
providence, the occasion of his coming to the 
knowledge of the truth. The place was prob- 
ably in the vicinity of Ephesus, as he seems to 
have studied there ; but this is hnmaterial. 
Let us hear him tell of it : '' And while I was 
thus disposed, when I wished at one period to 
be filled with great quietness, and to shun the 
path of men, I used to go into a certain field 
not far from the sea, and when I was near that 
spot one day, which having reached, I proposed 
to be by myself, a certain old man, by no 



28 New Light on the New Testament 

means contemptible in appearance, exhibiting 
meek and venerable manners, followed me at 
a little distance." 

After salutations, the venerable stranger 
told Justin that he had come to this place to 
look for friends who were absent and who 
might be returning. As it was in view of the 
sea, he was probably looking for the vessel by 
which they were expected. 

Justin having told him that he delighted in 
solitary walks to meditate on the great ques- 
tions of philosophy, the stranger began to dis- 
course of the vanity of mere human specula- 
tions about the great subject of religion (for 
this was the field of philosophy in which Jus- 
tin was most interested), and then dwelt on 
the need of a divine revelation such as existed 
in The Prophets, or Old Testament Scriptures, 
and of the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, 
to give us a satisfactory and saving view of 
the truth in these great matters. Then, Jus- 
tin tells us ; — 

'^ When he had spoken these and many other 
things, he went away, bidding me attend to 
them, and I have not seen him since ; but 
straightway a flame was kindled in my soul, 
and a love of the prophets and of those men 
who are the friends of Christ possessed me, 



New Light on a 3Iartyr^s Testimony 29 

and whilst revolving his words in my mind, I 
found this philosophy alone to be safe and 
profitable." (Dialogue Ch. 8.) ^ 

Thus we see how it was that Justin Martyr, 
though he became a Christian, never ceased to 
wear his philosopher's cloak. He found Chris- 
tianity to be the truest and highest of all 
philosophy, and did not cease to be a philos- 
opher by becoming a Christian.^ He seems 
to have been one of the most fearless and 
straightforward of all the witnesses for Christ 
in that brave age. Anyone who will read his 
two defenses of Christianity will see and feel 
this as he cannot otherwise do. 

Some years later, probably in 163, there was 
a thrilling scene in the court of the Koman 
prefect, Eusticus. The noble life was crowned 
with the noblest of deaths, that of a martyr 
for Christ. 



^ Justin seems to have been influenced, too, as we know 
Calvin was, by the conduct of those whom he observed under 
persecution. He teUs us: " AVhile I still found delight in 
the doctrines of Plato, and heard the Christians calumniated, 
but yet saw them fearless toward death, and all that men 
account fearful, I learned that it was impossible that they 
should live in sin and lust. ' ' 

^ ' ' The torch of Aristotle and Plato faded when he became 
familiar with the light of Christ." — Watkins' Bampton 
Lectures. 

Hart and Volkmar date the first Apology A. D. 145-148 ; 
Casparl and Kruger earlier. — Watkins^ Bampton Lectures, 



30 New Light on the New Testament 

Rusticus, the prefect of Rome, before whom 
Justin and other Christians were arraigned, 
demanded that they should deny their faith and 
salute the image of the emperor as divine. " Un- 
less," said he, " ye obey, ye shall be mercilessly 
punished." Justin said, " Through pi:ayer we 
can be saved on account of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, even when we have been punished, be- 
cause this shall become to us salvation and con- 
fidence at the more awful judgment seat of our 
Lord and Saviour." Thus also said the other 
martyrs : " Do what you will, for we are 
Christians and do not sacrifice to idols." 

Thus, like Moses, they endured, as " seeing 
him who is invisible." 

III. JUSTIK AS A WlTlN-ESS 

Let us now turn to the utterances of Justin 
Martyr addressed, in his two Apologies^ to An- 
toninus Pius, the emperor of Rome. 

Dr. Basil Gildersleeve in the introduction to 
his edition of Justin's Apologies^ says : — 

'' If Justin was acquainted with the Fourth 
Gospel, the whole fabric of a great historical 
school falls to the ground." 

This must be clear to all ; for if the first 
Apology was not written till as late as A. d., 
147 the date which Professor Gildersleeve fa- 



New Light on a Martyr'' s Testimony 31 

vors, it was written several years before the 
date assigned to the Gospel of John by the 
Tubingen School, i, e., A. D. 160-1 YO. Neander 
thinks the first Apology should be dated a. d. 
139. He says : " After the death of the Em- 
peror Hadrian, persecutions arose against the 
Christians, in the beginning 'of the reign of 
Antoninus Pius. Thereby Justin, who was 
then resident at Rome, was induced to address 
a writing in defense of the interests of the 
Christians to the emperor. Since, however, in 
the superscription of this work. Tie does not give 
the title of Cmsar to M. Aurelius, it is probably 
to be inferred that it was written before his 
adoption into that dignity, which took place 
in A. D. 139." 

But, taking the late date, there can be no 
doubt that Justin quotes it, and he surely 
could not have quoted it from thirteen to 
twenty-three years before it was written, or 
one minute before it was written, for that 
matter. 

That Justin did know John's Gospel, must 
be clear to any open-minded person w^ho will 
read in his first Apology^ chapter sixty-one, 
these words: — 

"Except ye be born again, ye cannot enter 
into the kingdom of heaven." In addition to 



32 New Light on the New Testament 

this he goes on to mention other words 
spoken in this conversation of Christ with 
Nicodemus, recorded in the third chapter of 
John's Gospel. 

In his dialogue withTrypho, chapter ninety- 
one, we find Justin giving a comment on John 
3 : 14, and several times he refers to the name 
which John gives to Christ — the Logos — "the 
word."^ It seems plain enough then that 
Justin, the successor of Aristides and Quad- 
ratus as a defender of the faith did have the 
Gospel of John in his hands, and therefore, 
'^ the whole fabric of a great historical school 
falls to the ground." Baur may hold the 
theory according to which the Gospel of John 
could not have been written till from A. d. 
160 to 170 ; but we find as a fact that it is 
quoted by Justin in his Apology addressed to the 
Emperor Antoninus Pius, and the theory must 
yield to the fact, and "fall to the ground." 
How is it with the three synoptic gospels ? 

See how Justin speaks of all the gospels 
together under a name which may be unfamil- 
iar to some of us, but which seems a very 
natural designation for them. He draws, in a 
few words, a picture of the worship of the 
Christians on Sunday. He tells the emperor : 

^ Not in Philo's sense. — Gilder sleeve. 



New Light on a Martyr^s Testimony 33 

" On the day called the day of the Sun (Sun- 
day) ^ there is a gathering together of all who 
dwell in city and country, with one accord 
(or in one place), and the Meinoirs of the 
Apostles and the Avri tings of the prophets are 
read." He continues with a further descrip- 
tion of their worship including the administra- 
tion of the Lord's Supper. The significant 
thing for us here is that The Memoirs of the 
Apostles are read in public worship and are 
evidently regarded as sacred scriptures, as 
they are read along with Old Testament Scrip- 
tures. But a question has been raised as to 
whether these Memoirs of the Apostles were 
our gospels, which contain apostolic memoirs 
of our blessed Lord. The controversy has 
been an earnest and prolonged one ; but it is 
hard to see how there can be any room for a 
difference of opinion about the matter. We 
need not go outside of the writings of Justin 
himself to determine without 2. shadow of 
doubt about what were the Memoirs of 
the Apostles. We need only cast our eyes 
up to the preceding chapter of the first apology 
on the same page (first Apology chapter sixty- 
six) and we read '^ The apostles in the memoirs 

^TT] TOO ijXioo XeyoijAvT} ijiiipa. 



34 New Light on the New Testament 

drawn up by them, which are called gospels, ^ 
thus enjoined on them, that Jesus taking 
bread, having blessed it, said, *This do in re- 
membrance of me; this is my body, and 
taking the cup, and having given thanks, said, 
This is my blood,' " etc. 

Surely this is conclusive as to what the 
Memoirs of the Apostles are. Justin calls them 
*' gospels," and we find in them what we find 
to-day in our gospels. Now if there could be 
any lingering doubt that this general name — 
Memoirs of the Apostles — means our four 
gospels, we may turn to another work of Justin 
where it is used and see proofs which must 
immediately scatter these doubts to the winds. 
In the Dialogue with Trypho, chapter one 
hundred, we read : "But also in the gospel it is 
written 'All things are delivered me of my 
Father,' and 'No man knoweth the Father but 
the Son ; nor the Son but the Father, and they 
to whom the Son will reveal him.' " We know, 

^Hostile critics have aUeged that this last expression is an 
interpolation. But, there is no manuscript evidence to sup- 
port this allegation, and the only reason they have made it 
seems to be that the words are so plainly fatal to their con- 
tention. The text is, so far as is known, as sound here as 
elsewhere. ''When a manuscript is found that does not 
contain the words ' which are called gospels, ' the gloss theory 
will deserve respect. Till then it has not a rag of reason to 
hide its nakedness." — Nicholson on the Gospel according to 
the HehrewSj p. 134. 



New Light on a Martyr^ s Testimony 35 

of course, that this is from our Gospel of 
Matthew 11 : 27, and so, what Justin states is 
written in the gospel,^ we find in our Gospel of 
Matthew. But he continues : " Christ called 
one of his disciples, previously known as Simon, 
Peter, since he recognized him to be the Christ, 
the Son of God, by the revelation of his 
Father ; and since we find it recorded in the 
Memoirs of the Apostles^''^ etc. All will 
recognize this as from the sixteenth chapter of 
Matthew, and this he says is '' recorded in the 
Memoirs of the Apostles,^^ So our Matthew 
must be a part of these Memoirs of the 
Apostles. Look on a little farther, and in 
chapter 103 we read: — 

^'For, if the Memoirs which I say were 
drawn up by the apostles and those who fol- 
lowed them, it is recorded that his sweat fell 
down like blood while he was praying and 
saying, if it be possible let this cup pass," 
etc. 

Here we find a quotation combining Luke 
22 : 41 and 42, and Matthew 26 : 39 and he 
speaks of it as being '' recorded in the Memoirs 

^''Gospel" is often used to mean the fonr gospels, as 
Watkins puts it, * ' to express the unity of a collected plural- 
ity." Justin so uses it, — See Wat'kins' Bampton Lectures. 

See, also, Charteris's Canonicity^ especially p. 63, foot- 
note. 



36 New Light on the New Testament 

which were drawn up by the apostles, and 
those who followed them." Now, Matthew 
and John whom he quoted were apostles and 
Mark and Luke were their followers, — Mark of 
Peter and Luke of Paul, for he quotes both of 
these extensively also. 

If we had space, I should like to transcribe 
the fifteenth chapter of the first Ajpology^ and 
show how, in it he quotes, Matthew seven 
times, Mark eight times, and Luke five times, 
so that in the short chapter of less than two 
12mo pages we have a cluster of selections 
from the three synoptic gospels with only a 
few words of his own to serve as a thread to 
hold together the jewels gathered from these 
^'Memoirs of the Ajpostlesy^ I think we 
would be very unreasonable to demand plainer 
proof that Justin Martyr had just the gospels 
we have and no others — and refers to them as 
Memoirs of the Apostles, 

Prof. James Drummond, Unitarian critic, 
and follower of Martineau, says of the foolish 
charge that John was copied from Justin : ^ — 

" It does seem to me surprising that any one 
in comparing the passages in Justin and John 

^ See Appendix. 

^ It is somewhat remarkable that one set of critics find 
nothing of John's Gospel in Justin, and another set find so 
much that they make this charge. 



New Light on a Martyr'' s Testimony 37 

should doubt for one moment that the de- 
pendence is on the side of the former." 

Tliis sufficiently ^' Liberal " critic concludes : 
" I must conclude, therefore, as best satisfying, 
on the whole, the facts of the case, not only 
that Justin regarded the Fourth Gospel as one 
of the historical ' memoirs ' of Christ, but 
that it is not improbable that he believed in 
its Johannean authorship. This is a very old- 
fashioned conclusion, but I have endeavored 
simply to follow the evidence without any 
ulterior object and must leave the result to the 
judgment of the reader." 

How remarkably this "old-fashioned con- 
clusion " for which he felt bound to apologize, 
has been confirmed by the discovery of The 
Diatessaron! Since this discovery, no self- 
respecting critic, however great his prejudices, 
can, if fully informed, either assert the de- 
pendence of John's Gospel on Justin or deny 
that Justin knew our four gospels, and them 
alone, as the authoritative Christian records of 
Christ's life and teachings. 

It is very hard to see how any honest reader 
of Justin's Apologies and Dialogue could have 
any doubt of this fact, since quotations from 
the Sjmoptic Gospels occupy a large propor- 
tion of the space these writings cover, and 



38 New Light on the New Testament 

besides evident references to, and quotations 
from, the Gospel of John, the whole of these 
writings are permeated with the unique 
thought of this gospel which stands apart 
from all that has ever been written by the 
hand of man. 

• The destructive critic Thoma, even, saj^s of 
Justin: "He cites the Synoptics; bethinks 
and argues according to John." 

All this w^as- evident before the discovery of 
The Diatessaron, Now, the case is settled ; 
for we find Tatian, who became a Christian 
under the instruction of Justin about A. D. 150, 
making a harmony out of the four gospels, 
and using ninety -six per cent of the Gospel of 
John in doing so, only four per cent being 
omitted because duplicated by statements in 
the other gospels. 

'' It is certain," says Dr. B. Weiss, " that 
Justin is also acquainted with Pauline epistles 
and is influenced by them. It is characteristic 
throughout that what he has chiefly adopted 
from the Epistle to the Romans is the applica- 
tion of the Old Testament in the Christian 
sense, as appears from the many citations com- 
mon to both in their form, connection and ap- 
plication (comp. Eom. 3: 11-17 and Dial. 27; 
9 : 27 ff. and Dial. 55 ; 11 : 16 and Dial. 42 ; 



NeiD Light on a Martyr'' s Testimony 39 

11 : 2 ff. and Dial. 39-46 ; 14 : 11 and Dial. 52), 
and the repeated statements respecting the 
justification of Abraham as the father of be- 
lieving Gentiles, taken from Rom. 4: (Dial. 
11 ; 23-119)." 

For proof of Justin's use of other Pauline 
epistles see Weiss' Introduction §7. 4. 

Weiss shows with equal clearness Justin's 
use of the Fourth Gospel. Lack of space pre- 
vents the presentation of the evidence in his 
words ; but his conclusion is that " the opinion 
that Justin was not yet acquainted with the 
Fourth Gospel, once so obstinately adhered to 
by the Tubingen School, must be regarded as 
definitely set aside." 

Justin sometimes quotes the gospels with the 
formula, "It is written," indicating that he 
regards them as Scripture. 

The use of the Epistle of James (Dial. 1.16), 
of 1 Peter (Dial. Y2), and of The Acts (1 
Apology, 39, 40, 50), is clearly shown. His 
knowledge of The Eevelation and the fact 
that it was written by the Apostle John, is 
indicated by such words as these : — (Dial. 81). 

''There was a certain man with us [Chris- 
tians] whose name was John, one of the apos- 
tles of Christ, who prophesied by a revelation 
that was made to him." Then follows a refer- 



40 New Light on the New Testament 

ence to the "thousand years, the general, and, 
in short, eternal resurrection and judgment of 
all men." Rev. 20. 

It is true that Justin does not always use 
the precise words of our received text. He 
evidently wrote with a rapidly running pen, 
and in the case of the second Apology, written, 
probably, on the eve of his execution, he evi- 
dently did not turn to each passage to verify 
his quotations. He joins together the words of 
two or three of the gospels in relating an inci- 
dent or stating a truth. Yet I think no one 
can point out a single expression which be- 
longs to any of the apocryphal gospels. 

The apocryphal " Gospel of Peter," discov- 
ered a few years ago at Akhmim in Egypt, 
which was in all probability the oldest of all 
the apocryphal gospels, is not quoted once. 
Justin's quotations are just such as would 
naturally be made by a man of great earnest- 
ness who had his memory well stored with the 
Scriptures, and had a vast number of quota- 
tions at his command, but did not turn to the 
chapter and verse, and copy every word ac- 
curately. We should remember that there 
were no chapters and verses then, and that 
Alexander Oruden was not yet born. 

Butj lest any should think me liable to mis- 



New Light on a 3Iartyr^s Testimony 41 

take on this point, I will, before concluding, 
quote the words of Westcott (Canon, p. 151). 
Says he: "It is enough to repeat in the 
presence of these facts that differences from 
the present text of the gospels such as are 
found in the present text of Justin are wholly 
inadequate to prove that passages so diifering 
could not have been taken from copies of our 
gospels." And this was written before the 
discovery of the apocryphal so-called " Gospel 
of Peter," and The Biatessaron of Tatian. 

It is proper to remark that almost certainly 
there were some differences between the text 
of the gospels used by Justin and our re- 
ceived text, or that of Westcott and Hort ; 
but the main differences between his quota- 
tions and our New Testament are due (as is 
plainly the case in his Old Testament quota- 
tions) to the fact that he quoted freely from 
memory and not with Bible and concordance 
in his hands. 

Dr. Purves has rendered a great service to 
the cause of truth and sound criticism by his 
L. P. Stone lectures on Justin Martyr, deliv- 
ered at Princeton, and no one, unless domi- 
nated by prejudice, can rise from the perusal 
of his fifth lecture, in which he brings a great 
mass of evidence from the two Apologies and 



42 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

the Dialogue to show Justin's use of the writ- 
ings which we now call the N'ew Testament, 
without agreeing in his conclusion that Justin 
had " reference to a distinct Christian litera- 
ture, which, while nothing definite is said of 
its authority in the Church, was evidently 
regulative of the Church's faith." 

The fact that Justin speaks of the gospels 
as read in the public worship of Christians 
along with the writings of the prophets, that 
he quotes the gospels with the formula, " It is 
written," together with his reverent use of 

what he calls '' our writings " ( Scriptures), 

indicates that, having the New Testament al- 
most, if not quite, in its entirety,^ he regarded 
it, though not yet '^ canonized " by any eccle- 
siastical council, as invested with the authority 
of apostles who had received the Holy Spirit 
according to Christ's promise, and " the prom- 
ise of the Father." 

Eeferring to the peculiarities of the text 
which Justin had before him, Dr. Purves says 
(p. 218) :— 



^ Dr. Eberhard Nestle, in his work, Introduction to 
Textual Criticism of the New Testament, though once a pro- 
fessor of Tubingen, moots the question (following Zahn), 
' ' Whether the entire New Testament, as the Doctrine of 
Addai says, was not a present which Tatian brought with 
him from Eome to his fellow-countrymen,'' etc. 



New Light on a Martyr's Testimony 43 

" We do not mean that Justin's text is now- 
represented in its entirety by any one manu- 
script or class of manuscripts, but that he 
gives evidence of that corruption of the ca- 
nonical texts which, according to abundant 
testimony, took place even in the century im- 
mediately succeeding that in which they were 
written, and which most plainly appears in 
those manuscripts which textual critics have 
classified as 'Western.' If, however, this be 
so, then Justin testifies, not only that our 
synoptic gospels existed in his day and were 
used by the Church as public documents, and 
were regarded as apostolic and authoritative 
records of the life of Christ ; but he also proves, 
by the incidental character of his quotations 
and by their very variations from the text of 
our gospels, that these latter were, in the 
middle of the second century, already ancient 
books, handed down from the apostolic age. 
No more explicit testimony to our synoptic 
gospels could well be asked of him ; and the 
very difficulties which at first present them- 
selves in his quotations, in the end confirm his 
evidence for their apostolic authority." 

Farther on (p. 248) he declares, " It is clear 
that at least the gospels had been formed into 
a sacred collection called Hhe gospel' which 



44 New Light on the New Testament 

ranked on an equality with the Old Testament, 
and that other apo&tolic books were used to 
regulate the faith of the Church." 

The strange mistake of Eusebius in interpret- 
ing the words of Papias seems to be responsi- 
ble for the figment of a second John/ and so 
to have helped to fashion one feature of that 
persistent ghost, the ''Johannean problem," 
though Eusebius himself had not a shadow of 
a doubt that the Fourth Gospel was written by 
the Apostle John. 

It is to be hoped that the phantom of false 
authorship, at least, is laid now, since Tatian's 
Diatessaron has risen from the dust of long 
oblivion to show unmistakably that Tatian's 
teacher, Justin, had the gospel of that John 
whom Justin describes as " one of the disciples 
of Christ," and the writer of The Eevelation.^ 

1 See Farrar's Early Days of Christianity Appendix, Ex- 
cursus XIV. I think that no unprejudiced person who un- 
derstands Greek can read this "Excursus" without being 
convinced that Eusebius misunderstood Papias. John the 
Presbyter was John the Apostle. The fact that there are 
two tombs of Washington at Mt. Vernon does not prove 
that there were two Washingtons, and the fact that there 
were two tombs at Ephesus, each claimed to be a tomb of 
John, does not prove that there were two Johns. 

^Origen says, (Commentary on John, Book I, Chap. 6), 
'' The gospels then, being four, I deem the firstfruits of the 
gospels to be that which you have enjoined me to search 
into according to my powers, the Gospel of John." 

Again, he says, " But Luke, though he says at the begin- 



New Light on a 31artyr's Testimony 45 

This new light on the old monument has 
made its inscriptions clear to all — but the 
blind. 

In the presence of evidence so incontroverti- 
ble, it is a strange thing to find a professor in 
a Congregational Theological Seminary speak- 
ing, in a late work,^ of the Gospel of John as 
"a writing about the middle of the second 
century." But then, when we find that this 
theological professor does not believe in Christ, 
except as a mere man, and remember how 
clearly the Gospel of John teaches his divinity, 
we see the explanation. Something had to be 
done to get this gospel out of the way ; and 
so in the face of all the overwhelming evi- 
dence of the falsity of the Tubingen theory, 
he still adheres to it. 

It may be true that German theological 
theories " go to England when they die," but 
they do not stop there. America is receiving 



ning of The Acts ' The former treatise did I make about aU 
that Jesus began to do and teach, ' yet leaves to him who 
lay on Jesus' breast the greatest and completest discourses 
about Jesus. ' ' 

There was no " Johannean problem" to Origen ; and it 
may be safely asserted that no man living from A. D. 185 to 
the middle of the third century knew every scrap of early 
Christian literature so thoroughly as he. 

^ Evolution of Trinitarianism, Professor Paine, Bangor 
Theol. Sem. 



46 New Light on the New I'estament 

a full share of these unquiet and disquieting 
spirits to haunt her halls of theological learn- 
ing, while their carcasses still pollute the relig- 
ious atmosphere of Germany. 



III. 

THE GREAT LIGHT FEOM THE VATICAN 

1. The reader will naturally wish to know 
more of the Diatessaron of Tatian, Justin's 
pupil, which, in God's good providence, arose 
from its long sleep and showed so plainly that 
Justin had our four gospels and no others. 

When Ciasca showed Antonius Morcos, the 
Apostolic Visitor of the Catholic Copts, the 
Arabic copy of the Diatessaron in the Vatican 
library, this ecclesiastic, as we have seen, 
promised to send him another manuscript of 
the same work which was owned by a gentle- 
man in Egypt. So there are now in Rome 
two Arabic copies of the Diatessaron, The 
Egyptian manuscript bears upon it the name 
of the donor in the following inscription at 
the end : " A present from Hallm Dos Ghall, 
the Copt, the Catholic, to the Apostolic See, 
in the year of Christ, 1886." 

This codex is described as follows : " The 
codex consists of three hundred and fifty-three 
leaves. There is no date attached, but the 

47 



48 New Light on the New Testament 

manuscript seems to belong, at the latest, to 
the fourteenth century. The pages are nine by 
six and one-quarter inches, inclosed in an illu- 
minated square of golden, red and purple lines, 
with an ornamentation of golden asterisks." ^ 

This manuscript was of great service in sup- 
plying two lacunaB in the first, caused by the 
loss of two folios, and in determining doubtful 
readings. It is described as being better than 
the first, in text and other respects, but quite 
inferior to it in orthography. 

It was deposited in the Borgian Library, 
and, from this fact, has been named the Borgian 
manuscript, while the other is called the Yati- 
can, because it has long been, and still is, in 
the Vatican library. It is entirely clear that 
these manuscripts are not copied the one from 
the other, nor from any common exemplar, 
though they have a common Syriac remote 
ancestor. 

In speaking of the great interest excited by 
the discovery of the '' New Syriac Gospels," 
by Mrs. Lewis, in 1892, Prof. Eendel Harris 
says, that " one of the first questions that will 
be asked will be, ' Why have you not done it 
into English ? ' " This has, at last, been done 

1 For fuller account see articles by Prof. M. Maher in The 
Month, London, for November and December, 1892. 



The Great Light from the Vatican 49 

in the case of Tatian's great work, and we 
have The Diatessaron done into English. We 
now have it in the recently published ninth 
volume of The Ante-Nicene Fathers^ trans- 
lated, according to the statement of the title- 
page, by Kev. Hope W. Hogg, B. D., though 
he informs us that his wife translated the larger 
part for him. The statement of the title-page 
is, then, made on the principle, Qui facit per 
alium facit per se^ only the alium should be 
aliam in this case. 

It is in keeping with a great trend of our 
times that we find the Cambridge ladies, Mrs. 
Lewis and her sister Mrs. Gibson, going to the 
St. Catherine Convent at Mount Sinai, and dis- 
covering the Syriac Gospels, and then see this 
Oxford lady w^orking side by side with her 
husband in giving the Diatessaron of Tatian 
to the English-speaking world. 

But an interesting question is, what of the 
form and contents of the Diatessaron ? 



II. The DiATESSAROisr as We Now Have It 

Harmonies are made in two forms, either in 
parallel columns (where the subject is men- 
tioned by more than one evangelist), or with 
all the gospels interwoven, so as to give a con- 



50 New Light on the New Testament 

tinuous narrative of events and utterances. 
The Diatessaron^ or Harmony, of Tatian is of 
the latter kind. 

(<z) A Contimwus Account 

The narratives of all the evangelists are com- 
bined so as to give an account of our Saviour's 
life and teachings in chronological order, so 
far as the compiler could determine this order. 
In this respect it is like the late Dr. William 
M. Taylor's Life of Our Lord in the Words 
of the Four Evangelists^ and other harmonies 
which might be mentioned. Hence, some old 
writers speak of it as the " gospel of the com- 
hined^'' as distinguished from the distinct gos- 
pels. 

(?>) The Genealogies Omitted 

Tatian omitted the genealogies. Theodoret 
intimates that this was due to a heretical tend- 
ency, and says that he also omitted every- 
thing which indicated that our Saviour was de- 
scended from David. That the last accusation 
is due to the prejudice of the heresy hunter is 
made clear by an inspection of the Diatessaron. 
No such omissions are to be found. On the 
other hand, in the very first section, Christ is 
spoken of as the son of David. " The Lord 
God shall give unto him the throne of his father 



The Great Light from the Vatican 51 

David "^ is the expression which, above all 
others, would have been omitted in such a 
case, but it is found here, coupled with the an- 
nouncement that " he shall be great, and shall 
be called the Son of the Highest." He did 
omit the genealogies, but so does Dr. Taylor, 
who surely will never be accused of Docetism. 
The omission was evidently due to the fact 
that it would be difficult to fit them into a con- 
tinuous narrative.^ 

((?) The Diatessaron is Divided into Fifty- 
five Sections 

It is only in comparatively recent times that 
our Bibles have been divided into chapters and 
verses for convenience of reference, and it is 
altogether probable that this division of the 
Diatessaron into sections was made for the 
convenience of those who read it in public 
services in Syria for several centuries. The 
division could not have been made by a man 
of Tatian's sense. It looks like the work of 
an idiot in many places, as there is no regard 
whatever to the subject, the division often 
coming in the middle of a narrative. Eendel 

1 Luke 1 : 32. 

^ The two Arabic manuscripts, the Vatican and the Bor- 
gian, have the genealogies, the first side by side in the 
narrative, and the latter appended at the close They have 
evidently been added by another hand after Tatian's day. 



52 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

Harris suggests that this division, into fifty-five 
sections was made in order that the whole 
might be read in churches ^ during the year on 
the Sabbaths and principal feasts. This seems 
altogether probable; but it is time to look 
at — 

{d) Some Peculiar Headings of the Diates- 
saron 

We should remember that it was almost in- 
evitable that there should be many expressions 
which would sound rather strange to ears ac- 
customed to the rhythm of the familiar words 
of King James' version, which we have heard 
from our childhood. Even the Ke vised Version 
sometimes at first surprised us with an unfa- 
miliar expression, though that is professedly 
not a new translation, but a revision of that of 
King James'. The Diatessaron was, as far as 
we can trace it, a Syriac Version. On the other 
hand, we have had the Greek text of the New 
Testament, the nearest to the original that 
could be determined by all the critical means 
available, and from it our English version was 
made, and the revised version was based chiefly 
on the Greek text of Westcott and Hort, the 

^ This is another reason for the omission of the genealogies. 
They may, indeed, have been in the original work ; hut ex- 
cluded in the preparation of it for public reading. 



The Great Light from the Vatican 53 

greater correctness of which was secured 
through many sources unknown when King 
James' version was translated. 

It is necessary to remember that the Bia- 
tessaron was almost certainly composed in 
Syriac. In spite of its Greek name and other 
reasons which Harnack urged for thinking 
that it was originally composed in Greek, 
Syriac scholars who have examined the ques- 
tion with great care pronounce it as certain 
that it was a Syriac book. At any rate, we 
know that from the early dawn of Syrian 
Christianity it was used in the churches in 
Syria. Therefore, when we read the Diates- 
saron in the English version just published, we 
are reading the translation of a text that 
branched off from the Greek very early, and 
that has passed through many vicissitudes, and 
may have suffered changes by the mistakes of 
copyists, by mistranslations in passing from 
version to version, and that has been influenced, 
as we have clear evidence, by contact with 
different versions which are well known. The 
accretions, and other changes from such 
sources, are noted by the learned editor of the 
Diatessaron in abundant footnotes. This 
being so, we need not expect the version be- 
fore us to tally exactly with either our Author- 



64 NeiD Light on the New Testament 

ized or the Eevised Yersion. In spite of all this, 
it is seldom that the meaning is affected to any 
marked degree. Some of the most singular 
turns of expression will be given, though, of 
course, the space allowed will not admit of any 
full display of these peculiarities. Here are 
some examples : — 

Old Simeon was preserved till he had "seen 
with his eyes the Messiah of the Lord." And 
in this form we have his " J^uno Dimittisy^ 
"Now loosest thou the bonds of thy servant, 
O Lord, in peace." We are rather surprised 
at the expression in the account of the 
offering of the Magi (which seems natural 
enough, however, when we remember that 
the camel w^as then, as it still is, used to 
cross the desert), " They opened their saddle- 
bags and offered to him offerings of gold, 
frankincense, and myrrh " (Matt. 2 : 11). 
In the account of the visit to Jerusalem 
during our Saviour's childhood, we are told 
that Joseph and his mother " supposed that 
he was with the children of their company " 
(Luke 2: 44). 

The version of John 1 : 18, giving a glimpse 
of the inscrutable relations of the Father and 
Son, is, "the only Son, God, which is in the 
bosom of the Father, he hath told of him." In 



The Great Light from the Vatican 55 

that scene in which John pointed out Christ 
to his own disciples, as John saw Jesus coming 
unto him, we hear him saymg : " This is the 
lamb of God that taketh on itself the burden 
of the sins of the world " (John 1 : 29). When 
his family could not understand the change 
that came over him when he began his public 
ministry and spoke his wonderful words and 
did his wonderful deeds, we are told, " And 
his relatives heard, and went out to take him, 
and said. He hath gone out of his mind." We 
find the Diatessaron following the Greek more 
closely and translating it more literally than 
our own English versions in the account of the 
thronging of the multitude about him when 
he w^as healing many, "so that they were 
almost falling upon (^TttTtinreiv) him^ on account 
of their seeking to get near him " (Mark 3 : 
10). The two sparrows are spoken of as " sold 
for a farthing vn a hond,'^'^ The meaningless 
phrase " in a bond" seems to have crept into 
the text by the similarity of the Syriac word 
for " farthing " and that for " in a bond." 
Indeed, a footnote tells us that the two 
phrases are but different explanations of the 
same Syriac consonants. In the account of 
the giving of sight to the blind man, Barti- 
maeus, Ave have one of the many indications of 



66 New Light on the New Testament 

the line of descent — the family genealogy, so 
to speak — of the Diatessaron text. When our 
Saviour asks the blind man what he wishes 
him to do for him, the Diatessaron represents 
him as replying, " My Lord and Master, that 
my eyes may be opened, so that I may see 
thee^ This remarkable addition to our Greek 
text is found, like many of the peculiar readings 
of the Diatessaron^ in the Curetonian Syriac 
manuscript. Several of these, too, are found 
in the "New Syriac Gospels," as Eendel 
Harris calls them, discovered by Mrs. Lewis 
at Mt. Sinai in 1892. These peculiar expres- 
sions indicate a relationship between the 
Diatessaron and the Curetonian and Lewis 
texts. But more of this anon. Passing on to 
the betrayal of our blessed Lord, we find the 
expression in reference to the thirty pieces of 
silver, "the thirty pieces of money, the price 
of the precious one." The seamless robe is thus 
referred to : " And his tunic was without 
sewing, from the top woven throughout." 
Our Saviour's crv from the cross to his Father 
is given in a strange form : " Yail, Yaili, why 
hast thou forsaken me?" In a footnote the 
translator says, " The syllable * Ya ' is, doubt- 
less, the Arabic interjection, ^ O ! ' so that it is 
' O God ! O my God ! ' " etc. The centurion 



The Great Light from the Vatican 57 

who, at the crucifixion, commanded the guard, 
is called " the officer of the foot-soldiers," and 
this the editor considers a mistake of the trans- 
lator into Arabic. It is, perhaps, unnecessary 
to give more instances of peculiar readings. 
These, as has been intimated, are such as we 
might very naturally expect to find in a text 
which was translated from the Greek at a very 
early day, and had been retranslated into 
Arabic, and, of course, recopied a number of 
times. 

We are familiar with the sight of a large 
snowball rolled on the ground in various 
directions, with one object after another 
adhering to it, having been picked up in its 
course, while, perhaps, a bit of color on its 
surface here and there shows the kind of soil 
on which it has been rolled. It is liable to be 
somewhat thus with the text that has been 
translated and copied over and over again. 
Some accretions will stick to it, and it will 
take the color of the life and habits and modes 
of speech of the people among whom it is 
translated or copied, and the peculiarities of 
versions with which it has come in contact. 
A remarkable thing about the Diatessaron^ is 
that its text is so pure that no doctrine or fact 
of the New Testament is at all distorted in 



58 New Light on the New Testament 

it;^ and the characteristic to which attention 
should be drawn is, that Tatian gave only the 
words of the four evangelists, No word of ex- 
planation connects the phrases that are care- 
fully woven together to set forth the wonder- 
ful life and words of Christ. No attempted 
reconciliation of apparent discrepancies is 
given ; and there is nothing answering to the 
headings of chapters in our English Bible, 
even. In the words of the last writer who 
mentions the Diatessaron as a work which he 
knew, before its disappearance, Abd Ischo (or 
Ebed Jesu), who died early in the fourteenth 
century, " With all diligence he attended to 
the utmost degree to the right order of those 
things which w^ere done and said by the 
Saviour ; of his owm he did not add a single 
saying."^ 

^ Yet, when read at family prayers its peculiar expressions 
enchain the attention of young and old, throwing, as they 
sometimes do, new light on the narrative. 

'^ It seems impossible to account for Harnack's charge of 
freedom in the handling of the gospels by Tatian in making 
his harmony, unless he considers the very act of making a 
harmony one of freedom. No harmonist from Tatian's day 
to our own^ it may safely be said, ever handled the gospels 
with more reverence. He seemed to refrain, indeed, from 
putting in one word of his own, even as a connective, or for 
purposes of reconciliation of accounts or of explanation of 
obscurities. One does not like to think that the exigencies 
of Harnack's critical creed may have influenced his judg- 
ment. 



The Great Light from the Vatican 59 

While the Diatessaron gathered some accre- 
tions, on the other hand we find that it escaped 
some corruptions that are found in our Greek 
received text. One such case, at least, and 
that a notable one, may be seen in the omission 
of the account of the woman taken in adultery, 
which, by the almost unanimous consent of 
critics, is now considered spurious. It crept 
into the text very early. But it evidently was 
not considered a part of the Holy Scripture 
(though it may have been known as a verbal 
tradition) in the time of Origen. In his com- 
mentary on John, just published, in the same 
volume with the Diatessaron^ that account 
(John 7 : 53-8 : 11) is omitted. The fact that 
Tatian omits it indicates that he wrote before 
it had crept into the text. The Diatessaron, 
does, however, include the gloss (as it almost 
certainly is), about the angel descending and 
troubling the water in the pool of Bethesda 
(John 5 : 3, 4), and this is an indication of the 
very early introduction into the text of these 
words, which were probably written as an ex- 
planation by some transcriber who lived early 
enough to know of this as the traditional belief 
of the Jews about this pool. 

When we see so remarkable a work as the 
Diatessaron in which, with great care, the 



60 New Light on the New Testament 

four gospels are interwoven, one supplying 
what another omits, in order to form a con- 
tinuous account of the life of our Lord, w^e 
are naturally anxious to know what manner 
of man it was w^ho, little more than a half 
century after the last gospel w^as penned, 
undertook this labor of love. Tatian, like 
Justin Martyr, \vho, it seems, led him to 
Christ, was a heathen philosopher who came 
to find the truest philosophy in Christianity. 

III. Tatiais^, the Fikst Haemonist 

He is the first harmonist of whom anything 
is known, and it is not at all probable that there 
was one before him. His great zeal for Chris- 
tianity, as well as his originality and genius, 
point to him as the probable inventor of this 
mode of presenting the life of our blessed 
Lord on earth. 

In the introductory note to the Borgian 
manuscript of the Diatessaron he is called 
'' Titianus, the Greek." This is evidently the 
mistake of a copyist, for he himself tells us in 
so many words that he was an Assyrian.^ It is 



^ He was probably of Greek parentage, though born in 
Assyria. Assyria had been incorporated by Trajan in the 
Roman province of Syria. Hence he is sometimes caUed a 
Syrian. 



The Great Light from the Vatican 61 

true that he wrote in Greek as well as in Syriac, 
of which his Address to the GreeJcs (^A6yo<$ -/^o? 
EUr]va<^) is witness. He was a student of 
philosophy in general, but inclined to that of 
Plato as his own philosophical creed. He was 
born and reared a heathen, and, in the prosecu- 
tion of his studies, traveled over many coun- 
tries that he might study the systems of 
various nations. When he became acquainted 
with the Old Testament Scriptures he was im- 
pressed with the fact that these ''barbaric 
books," as he at first considered them (as a 
Greek philosopher of that day very naturally 
Avould), were ''too old to be compared with 
the learning of the Greeks, too divine to be 
put on a level with their erroneous doctrine." 
It should be remembered that Moses preceded 
Herodotus, " the father of history," by more 
than a millennium, and it is not strange that 
he should have been impressed with the vener- 
able antiquity of the books which "Moses 
wrote." . Fortunately for him the higher critics 
were not to be born for nearly two millenni- 
ums after his time. 

The account of his conversion to Christianity 
is thus given by Neander, who makes a sum- 
mary of what Tatian himself tells in his 
Address to the Greeks : — 



62 New Light on the New Testament 

" He was brought up in heathenism, and frequent travels 
gave him the opportunity of learning the multifarious sorts of 
heathen worship which at that time were existing together 
in the Roman empire. None among them all could recom- 
mend itself to him as reasonable. Not only did he observe 
how religion was used in them to the service of sin, but even 
the highly wrought allegorical interpretations of the ancient 
myths as symbols of a speculative system of natural philosophy 
could not satisfy him ; and it appeared to him a dishonorable 
proceeding for a man to attach himself to the popular 
religion who did not partake in the common religious belief, 
and who saw nothing in its doctrine about the gods but 
symbols of the elements and powers of nature. The mys- 
teries into which he suffered himself to be initiated appeared 
to him also, in the same manner, not to correspond to the 
expectations which they awakened ; and the contradictory 
systems of philosophy offered him no sure grounds of reli- 
gious faith. He was rendered mistrustful of them by the 
contradiction which he often observed in those who gave 
themselves out as philosophers, between the seriousness 
which they exhibited, for the sake of appearances, in their 
dress, mien, and language, and the levity of their conduct. 
While he was in this condition he came to the Old Testa- 
ment, to which his attention was drawn by what he had 
heard of the high antiquity of these writings in comparison 
with the Hellenic religions, as might easily be the case 
with a Syrian. He himself says of the impression which 
the reading of this book made upon him : — 

*' '■ These writings found acceptance with me because of 
the simplicity of their language, the unstudiedness of the 
writers, the intelligible history of the creation, because of 
the prediction of the future, because of the wholesomeness 
of -their precepts, and because of the doctrine of the ONE 
GOD which prevails throughout them.' 

*' The impression which the study of the Old Testament 



The Or eat Light from the Vatican 63 

made on him would appear, from this, to have been with 
him the preparation for a belief in the gospel. 

"Coming, in this state of mind, to Rome, he was con- 
verted to Christianity by Justin, of whom he speaks with 
great reverence.'' — Neander^s Church History^ p. 418, Roses 
translation. 



Tatian, like his spiritual father, Justin 
Martyr, retained his philosopher's cloak after 
he became a Christian, maintaining the posi- 
tion that he did not cease to be a philosopher 
in embraciug Christianity, but rather advanced 
to that which is the highest and only true 
philosophy. 

So firmly, however, were some of the princi- 
ples of Platonism rooted in his mind that he 
seems to have been much influenced by them in 
his views and teachings during the latter part 
of his life. While Justin lived, however, we 
have the best testimony that he was free from 
the fault of teaching that dualism which is 
laid to his charge in his latter days. 

Some time, we know not how long, after the 
martyrdom of Justin, he became a leader 
among the Encratites, and, it seems, declaimed 
against marriage and the drinking of wine as 
sinful. He also taught that Adam was not 
saved, deducing this opinion from the assertion 
of the Scriptures that " In Adam, all die." 



64 New Light on the New Testament 

Irenaeus and Hippolytus speak of Tatian as, 
at last, a Gnostic, and Valentinian teachings 
are attributed to him. 

These accusations quite probably contain an 
element of exaggeration as the result of 
ecclesiastical zeal, as Tatian is said by Irenaeus 
to have " separated from the Church." 

Whatever amount of deflection from the 
truth of Christianity he may have been guilty 
of, we may be quite sure that it was due to 
that fruitful source of heresies in all ages — ours 
being by no means an exception — the adoption 
of a false philosophy and the endeavor to fit 
Christianity to the Procrustean bed thus pre- 
pared for it. The whole history of Gnosticism 
is an illustration of this process as followed in 
the early days of Christianity, and the destruct- 
ive school of criticism, founded by Baur of 
Tubingen on the postulates of the Hegelian 
philosophy, is an object lesson for our times of 
the folly of assuming the infallibility of some 
human theory and then trying to square God's 
word to it. The reverse order of procedure 
must suggest itself to every one who believes 
in the infallibility of the Scriptures as a Eeve- 
lation from God to man, as the only true and 
safe course. 

IrenaBus tells us (Adv. Haeres. Book I, Ch. 



The Great Light from the Vatican 65 

xxviii.) that as long as Tatian enjoyed the 
companionship of Justin Martyr, "he ex- 
pressed no such views, but after his (Justin's) 
martyrdom, he separated from the Church," 
and also that he " composed his own peculiar 
type of doctrine," and that, among other 
things, " he declared that marriage was noth- 
ing but corruption and fornication." 

We may well grieve that one who was so 
earnest in his advocacy of Christianity, and 
who held himself always in readiness to lay 
down his life in testimony of his faith, should, 
in any degree, have turned from the straight 
line of orthodoxy, and should, at last, have 
separated himself from the Church ; yet we 
can never be too grateful for the fact that he 
composed the Diatessaron from the very words 
of the inspired gospels of our Lord, "adding 
not one of his own." 

Much as we may regret the false views into 
which a false philosophy and a mistaken zeal 
led him, it is an additional reason for grati- 
tude that this very departure from orthodoxy 
on Tatian's part makes the evidence of the 
Diatessaron for the genuineness of the gospels 
more decisive ; because this makes it well- 
nigh certain that he composed the harmony in 
the earlier part of his Christian career. This 



66 New Light on the New Testament 

will be more fully considered when we come 
to make an estimate of the value of the evi- 
dence furnished by this work. 

We will now turn to look at some of the 

IV. FOOT-PRINTS OF THE DlATESSARO]^ 

DowjN^ THE Ages 

There are few books that have come down 
to us through more than seventeen centuries 
that have left plainer traces along their paths. 
There is ample evidence of the existence of 
the work from a very early date down to the 
time of the Nestorian bishop Ebed Jesu (or, 
as our translator writes it, Abd Ischo), who 
died in 1308. For more than five centuries it 
had been lost, or at least had been unrecog- 
nized hy the learned, when it was translated 
into Latin by Oiasca in 1888. We have it 
now in the two Arabic manuscripts which 
have been mentioned, as well as the commen- 
tary on it written by Ephraem Syrus, who died 
in A. D. 373. This commentary is in two 
manuscripts in the Armenian language, which 
have a common remote ancestor, doubtless, 
but differ enough to show that neither was 
copied from the other. These Armenian 
manuscripts contain a commentary following 
in a remarkable way the same order of events 



The Great Light from the Vatican 67 

as the complete Arabic manuscripts of the 
Diatessaron which we now have. It has been 
remarked that while these Arabic manuscripts 
show the influence on their text of the Peshito 
version (or Peshitta, as it is now called), the Ar- 
menian manuscripts of Ephraem's commentary 
contain peculiar readings of the Curetonian 
manuscript and of that which Eendel Harris 
considers the Curetonian's ancestor, the Lewis 
Sinai tic Palimpsest ; ^ and references and quota- 
tions *'go to show that the Armenian text 
stands much more closely related to the original 
than does the Arabic " (Introd. in IX. Vol. 
Ante-Nicene Fathers, § 15). 

Thus the Armenian manuscripts are another 
independent witness, not only of the existence, 
from very early times, of the Diatessaron^ but 
of the fact that Ephraem wrote a commentary 
on it, for they are manuscripts of that com- 
mentary itself. 

-The Diatessaron was very extensively used 
in Syrian churches until the Peshito version 
(Peshitta) gradually took its place in the fifth 
century. Even after this it was studied and 
valued. 

Dionysius Bar Salibi, Bishop of Armida 
(twelfth century), has this to say of it : 

^ Called by Harris, The New Syriac Gospels. 



68 New Light on the New Testament 

*' Tatian, disciple of Justin, the philosopher 
and martyr, selected from the four gospels 
and combined and composed a gospel, and 
called it Diatessaron — ^. ^., The Combined, 
. . . and upon this gospel Mar Ephraera 
commented. Its commencement was ' In the 
beginning was the Word.' " 

But this, with the exception of the assertion 
that the Diatessaron began with the first verse 
-of the Gospel of John, was said, about 350 
years earlier, by a Syriac commentator on the 
New Testament, Isho 'dad of Merv (a. d. 852), 
who mentions, also, another Diatessaron by 
Ammonius,^ who lived nearly a century after 
Tatian. 

As belonging to this (ninth) century, the 
subscription of the Borgian manuscript should 
be noted. As we have seen, that states that 
it was translated from Syriac into Arabic 
'' from an exemplar written by 'Isa-ibn-'Alial- 
Motatabbib, pupil of Honain ibn-Ishak," who, 
we learn, was a famous Arabic physician and 
teacher of Bagdad (d. 773), whose school pro- 
duced manv translators. 



^ This Harmony of Ammonius of Alexandria (not Am- 
monius Saccas) was unlike the Diatessaron of Tatian. It 
was not "combined." or interwoven, but had the four 
gospels, it would seem, in four parallel columns. 



The Great Light from the Vatican 69 

Of Isho 'dad of Merv, Prof. Eendel Harris 
tells us that he transferred to his pages 
" some of the most astonishing interpretations 
which are found in Ephraem's commentary, 
and gives his express statement of his depend- 
ence, in these peculiar interpretations, upon 
the Syrian father." He also tells us that 
what is true of Isho 'dad is equally true of 
Bar Salibi and Bar Hebraeus,^ and taking one 
passage. Matt. 2: 23, as an instance, says : — 

'• Syriac authors steadily quote, and some of them ascribe 
to Ephraem, a curious scholium on Matt. 2 : 23 " (it is an 
explanation given by Ephraem of the words, He shall be 
called a Nazarene), '' and this scholium is actually found in 
the Armenian Commentary.'' 

Victor of Capua, too, had Tatiari's Diates- 
saron in A. D. 545. A century earlier, we And 
Theodoret, the zealous bishop of Cyrrhus, very 
much exercised over the general use of the 
Diatessaron in the churches of his diocese, 
and, impressed with the fact that Tatian was 
a heretic, employing very energetic measures 
to keep his flock from using it. Writing on 
Heresies, 453, he says, '^ I myself found more 

^ Bar Hebrseus lived eighty or ninety years after Bar 
Salibi. 



70 New Light on the New Testament 

than two hundred copies in reverential use in 
the churches of our district. All these I col- 
lected and removed, replacing them by the 
gospels of the four Evangelists." 

About a century before this, Ephraem, " the 
most renowned father of the Eastern Church," 
wrote his commentary, a translation of which 
from Armenian into Latin was made by Moe- 
singer, as we have seen, in 1876, and texts 
from which, published by Zahn in 1881, led to 
the examination and translation of the Arabic 
manuscript of the Diatessaron in the Vatican 
library, and its publication by Ciasca in time 
for the Pope's jubilee in 1888. 

Another step brings us to Eusebius, and 
though he does not seem to have been very 
familiar with the Diatessaroriy as was natural, 
he being a writer in Greek and that being in 
Syriac, yet he speaks of it distinctly and indi- 
cates clearly his knowledge of its plan and 
contents. He says : — 

'• Tatian having put together a certain harmony (^(jovdcpeiav) 
and combination (I know not how) of the gospels, named 
this the Dia Tessaron'' (^Aid Te(7(Tdpaj>'). (H. E. IV. 29.) 

Then, when we go back through a century 
to Hippolytus, we find him speaking of Tatian 
as an Encratite and Gnostic. 



The Great Light from the Vatican 71 

When we go still farther back to Irenasus, 
the teacher of Hippolytus, we find him speak- 
ing of Tatian in the same wa}'^, and Irenasus 
was his contemporary for about a half century, 
and Hippolytus was probably twenty years 
old when Tatian died. 

Now, it is well known that Irenaeus was the 
devoted pupil of Polycarp, and that Polycarp 
was the disciple of John, '' that disciple whom 
Jesus loved," being more than thirty years old 
when John died.^ Irenaeus quotes the Gospel 
of John extensively, and Tatian places almost 
the whole of it, about ninety-six per cent — a 
much larger proportion than would have been 
possible in the case of any of the other gos- 
pels — in the Diatessaron, This settles the 
much talked of " Johannean problem," which 
must now retire to the shades of that limbo 
into which so many of the bloodless phantoms 
of the Tubingen School have disappeared. 

An clement of importance in this discussion 
is the answer to the question : — 



^ The date of Poly(3arp's martyrdom has been determined, 
with a high degree of probability, as February 23d. A. D. 55, 
and not in the time of Marcus Aurelius, as has long been 
thought, and, indeed, as Eusebius tells us. The reasons for 
13ref erring the date mentioned cannot be given here, but they 
are now quite generally accepted as conclusive. 



72 New Light on the New Testament ^ 

V. Whejn^ Tatian Composed the Diates- 

SARON 

As to the date of the Diatessaron^ common 
sense obliges us to agree with Harnack when 
he says, " It cannot have been produced during 
his later years, for all traces of dualism are 
absent." 

The testimony of Irenseus is clear as to the 
fact that Tatian, his contemporary for about 
fifty years, did not teach " his peculiar form of 
doctrine " till after the martyrdom of Justin, 

We find in the Diatessaron all those narra- 
tives and teachings which are most thoroughly 
out of keeping with the Encratite form of 
asceticism, given in full. Tatian in his latter 
days condemned marriage and the use of 
wine ; but in the Diatessaron the account of 
the marriage in Cana of Galilee and the turn- 
ing of water into wine is faithfully recorded, 
as well as Luke 7 : 33, 34. 

Professor Gildersleeve, in his Introduction to 
his edition of Justin Martyr's Apologies^ gives 
preference to A. D. 163 as the date of Justin's 
martyrdom. 

The most probable time, for the composition 
in so laborious,^ painstaking and reverent a 

^ Glancing down a page of the Diatessaron^ we see aU four 
of the gospels quoted in five (5) lines, so carefully are they 



The Great Light from the Vatican 73 

way, of this harmony of the four gospels, must 
have been hefore Tatian had undergone this 
change — before the simplicity of his faith had 
at all received the taint of that Gnosticism 
which was so rife in his day. The motive for 
such a work was probably strongest when he 
first came to know the gosjpels^ and when he felt 
the ardor of his ''first love^ The most prob- 
able date, then, is soon after A. D. 150. 

YI. The Diatessaeon as a "Witness of 
THE Gospels 

{a) It shows that the Apocryphal Gospels^ 
so called^ are all spurious. 

The importance of this may not be ap- 
preciated by all ; but those who have been 
plied with assertions that there are many 
other gospels as old and almost as good as 
four/ will be glad of the ability to give a 
ready answer ; and the Diatessaron furnishes 
that answer in a most conclusive form. It 
contains the gospels as known to Tatian, and 
he a man of the widest information, born 
about ten years after the Apostle John died, 

interwoven. In at least one place, all the four gospels are 
drawn on to make up four lines. 

^ This is one of the commonest of all cavils, though, as we 
see, entirely baseless. 



14: New Light on the New Testament 

Jcnows of no gospels hict tJiose of Matthew^ 
MarTc^ Luke^ and John, He evidently lived 
hefore any apochryjphal gospel was written^ or 
certainly before any such writings gained any 
credence in the Christian Church. The very 
name, Diatessaron (^£« Teaadpoj^^j — through four 
— implies that the life of our Lord was given 
through four gospels, and four only. 

(h) It absolutely overthrows the Tubingen 
theory as to the late origin of our four gospels. 

As we have seen, Baur dates the first three 
gospels from 130 to 160, and John during the 
decade ending a. d. 170. Since the discovery 
of the Diatessaron^ honest followers of the 
Tubingen School have acknowledged that 
Baur's position was utterly untenable. Renan 
acknowledges that the four gospels are not 
spurious. Adolf Harnack, too, admits " that 
we learn from the Diatessaron that about A. D. 
160, our four gospels had already taken a 
place of prominence in the Church, and that 
no others had done so^ that in particular, the 
Fourth Gospel had taken a place alongside the 
synoptics." And, also, " that as regards the 
text of the gospels we can conclude from the 
Diatessaron that the text of our gospels about 
the year 160 already ran essentially as we 
now read them " (Harnack as quoted in 



The Great Light from the Vatican 75 

article on Tatian in Encyclopagdia Britannica). 
But the Diatessaron proves much more than 
this. If we find a harmony of the four 
gospels prepared as early as 160, at the latest, 
we may conclude that these gospels had been 
accepted as the authoritative records of our 
Saviour's life, long before this time. A 
harmony of the gospels would not naturally 
come into existence immediately on the 
writing of the gospels. In the words of 
Professor Maher {The Month^ London, Nov- 
ember, 1892), " If Tatian, knowing the whole 
Church as he did, devoted himself to the con- 
struction of an elaborate harmonized gospel 
narrative, in which the paragraphs, texts and 
fragments of texts are interwoven with the 
utmost pains and ingenuity, and the very 
greatest care directed to the preservation of 
even the smallest words of our four gospels, 
it can only be because these four gospels and 
the least part of their contents had before this 
time been received by the Church, as a sacred 
deposit of divine truth." Now, when we 
think of the fact that there were then no 
steam printing presses, no railroads for rapid 
distribution, and no general councils to stamp 
them as authoritative, we must conclude that 
this result, of a general acceptance in the 



76 New Light on the New Testament 

different districts, of all the four gospels as a 
divine record of Christ's life, must have re- 
quired a period of many years' duration. In 
the words of the same writer, " The Diatessaron 
proves that, in the minds of the Christian 
world of that day, every sentence and syllable, 
every jot and tittle of these gospels possessed 
a peculiar sacredness. Zahn's conclusion, 
then, cannot be very far from the truth, ' In 
view of the history of the text, opinions as to 
the origin of John's Gospel, such as Baur has 
expressed, must appear simply as madness. 
It follows, further, that the element which re- 
mains the same in all the originals, and of the 
versions amid all the variations that crept into 
the text between A. D. 150 and 160, must have 
been everywhere read at the beginning of the 
second century.' " 

They were certainly thus read as soon as 
the Gospel of John could be reproduced by 
copyists and distributed. 

{c) Confirms the testimony of IrencBus and 
Polycarp. 

Irenaeus (a. d. 200) quotes the four gospels 
as fully as any modern orthodox theologian 
would, tells us plainly that there were four 
gospels, and only four, and speaks of them as 
"Holy Scripture." Now, as we have seen, 



The Great Light from the Vatican 77 

Tatian was the contemporary of Irenaeus for 
about fifty years, and Irenseus speaks of him 
at some length. When we consider that 
Tatian was the contemporary of Poly carp, the 
teacher of Irenseus, for more than forty years, 
and that Polycarp was a pupil of the Apostle 
John, and his contemporary for more than 
thirty years, and, then, that this Tatian pre- 
pared a harmony of the four gospels, with 
that of John most prominent of all, it would 
seem that we are warranted in saying, as we 
have done above, that the " Johannean prob- 
lem " has vanished, and that the apostolic au- 
thority of all the gospels is established. 

{d) Confirms the testimony of Justin 
Martyr, 

The Diatessaron makes it certain that the 
" Memoirs of the Apostles " {aiToixvriiiovBoiiaTa rwv 
aizoGTokiDv^ first Apology^ 67), spoken of by 
Justin Martyr, as read in the worship of the 
Christians, were our four gospels, and not any 
then recent record of verbal traditions. 
Tatian was the pupil of Justin, and made this 
harmony of our four gospels, and, as we have 
seen, in all probability, composed his harmony 
in the lifetime of Justin.^ It is not at all im- 

^ '' Writers in question, more particularly, Justin, quoted, 
at least at times, not from our separate gospels, but from a 



78 Neiv Light on the New Testament 

probable, indeed, that he did it under his super, 
vision and with his help. Those memorials of 
the Saviour's life which Justin recognized as 
bearing the stamp of apostolic authority, and 
as Holy Scripture, were our four gospels. 

The alternative would imply, to employ a 
quotation of Prof. Basil Gildersleeve, in com- 
menting on these words of Justin Martyr, that 
'' an entire change of gospels was made through- 
out all the different and distant provinces of 
the Koman Empire, at a time when concerted 
action through general councils was unknown, 
and that, too, in so silent a manner that no 
record of it remains in the history of the 
Church." 

{e) Confirms the testimony of the ^^ New 
Syriac Gospels.'^'' 

I was at first led to believe (and, as some 
may know, expressed the belief) that, in these 
gospels, there were marks of manipulation of 
the account of the nativity of our Saviour in 
Matt. 1 : 16, 21 and 25, which indicated that 



harmony of the gospels." — {Rendel Harris^ Diafessaron of 
Tatian, p. 54.) 

We know that Tatian wrote such a harmony. That was 
not published tiU after Justin's death ; but it would not be 
improbable that some sort of rough draft might have been 
used by both master and scholar before its publication. '^ — 
Dr. IV, Sanday, Bampton Lectures^ p. 301. 



The Great Light from the Vatican 79 

this Syriac text was used in the propagation 
of the Cerinthian heresy ; and Cerinthus was 
a younger contemporary of the Apostle John 
(See Prof. J. Kendell Harris's Art. in Contem- 
porary Review^ November, 1894). This, if 
true, would seem to show that the four gos- 
pels were not only written, but already gath- 
ered together, recognized, by heretics as well 
as the orthodox, as the authoritative records 
of Christianity, and then translated into 
Syriac ; and that, in the lifetime of a contem- 
porary of the Apostle John. The Diatessaron 
adds much to the probability that Professor 
Harris's conclusion is true, so far as the age of 
these Syriac gospels is concerned. It shows 
marks of the Curetonian Syriac text, and, ac- 
cording to Prof. Harris, this is a revised ver- 
sion of the "New Sj^riac Gospels" in the in- 
terest of orthodoxy. It would seem, then, that 
these Zeivis gospels^ or Sinaitic palimpsest, were, 
so to speak, two generations earlier than the 
Diatessaron, and that they must have been 
translated near the beginning of the second 
century. 

Mrs. Lewis, the discoverer of the Siriaitic 
palimpsest, dissents from Dr. Harris's opinion 
that the version was Cerinthian in character, 
saying that " some of the most eminent schol- 



80 New Light on the New Testament 

ars in England, France, and Germany, includ- 
ing Dr. Westcott, have pronounced in favor 
of its orthodoxy." 

However this point may be decided, there is 
little if any doubt of the very early origin of 
this translation of the four gospels. The J)ia- 
tessaron is good evidence on this point. 
Whether the Sinaitio or the Curetonian is the 
earlier Syriac version, may be left to the crit- 
ics to discuss, and if they can do so, decide ; 
but that both are older than the Diatessaron 
there can be little doubt, as peculiar readings 
of both these versions are found in it. 

The Diatessaron^ then, shows that both these 
versions must have been made early in the 
second century ; and one of them may have 
been made before it began. 

The only alternative, evidently, is that a 
Syriac version, the ancestor, so to speak, of 
both of these, was that from which the Diates- 
saron was composed, and for the settling of 
the main question, the genuineness of the gos- 
pels, this would amount to the same thing. It 
is well nigh certain that both these versions 
precede the Diatessaron^ and it has been gen- 
erally thought that another Syriac version pre- 
ceded them. 

The Diatessaron and Sinaitic palimpsest both 



The Great Light from the Vatican 81 

lack the account of the woman taken in adul- 
tery. This is a characteristic of the earliest 
texts. But the Sinaitio also lacks the last 
chapter of Mark after the eighth verse, while 
the Diatessaron has it. This is one of the 
many signs that the Sinaitic is earlier than the 
Diatessaron. It also shows that the Diates- 
saron drew on some source other than the 
SvniatiG (the Curetonian ?), for this part of its 
text. 

CONCLUSION 

YIL The Diatessaron, an Independent 
Witness 

When the Diatessaron is spoken of as con- 
firming the testimony of so many other wit- 
nesses, it should not be inferred that its testi- 
mony is in any sense dependent on theirs. 
While it makes clearer and more conclusive 
the testimony which each of them gives, its 
own would stand unimpeachable, even on the 
impossible supposition that theirs could be 
refuted. Among all these witnesses it occu- 
pies a unique position. It is the only copy of 
the gospels of that early time that is known to 
have come from the pen of a well-hnoivn histor- 
ical character. It is as certain that Tatian 
prepared this harmony from the four gospels 



82 New Light on the New Testament 

in a complete form as any fact of that date 
can be to us. This, of course, absolutely fixes 
its date within the narrow limits of a very few 
years of Tatian's life. Other versions were 
certainly earlier, at least the one from which 
this harmony was composed ; but the age of 
each one has to be determined by internal 
marks. The age of this is settled historically 
and without reference to those internal signs 
by which specialists determine the date of texts. 

Pharos, the world's wonder, reared its mar- 
ble shaft far aloft, and threw its great light 
over all the approaches to Alexandria, showing 
the positions of other landmarks doubtless ; 
but without reference to them, its -position was 
well known to all the world, and if they had 
been swept away, it would still have served its 
own great purpose. 

Thus, we see the Diatessaron — the fourfold 
gospel — standing about a half century after 
John as a monumental witness of the genuine- 
ness of the gospels which furnish those facts 
that are the foundation of our faith — facts 
concerning God's merciful intervention to save 
the lost through Jesus Christ, whom he hath 
anointed and named Jesus because ^'lie shall 
save his people from their sins " — and reveal- 
ing to us, so to speak, the locations of other 



The Great Light from the Vatican 83 

beacons still nearer the shore and shining with 
the light of all the gospels. 

In plain words, while its own testimony is 
clear and indubitable, it also serves to empha- 
size and confirm that of the contemporaries of 
Tatian, Irenasus, Justin, and Polycarp, and 
shows us that, in the Syriac version or versions 
from which it was composed, the Syrian Chris- 
tians had their need supplied by copies of the 
four gospels, complete and distinct, made still 
earlier. 

We may appeal to the common sense of all 
honest men, and ask, in view of all these facts : 

Is it credible that if the gospels had heen 
forgeries^ the great company of Syrian Chris- 
tians would have received^ as a part of the 
Holy Scriptures^ these versions made^ when 
there were still living thousands of Christians 
who were contemporaries of the Apostle John 
in their youth? The improbability is too 
great to be entertained for a moment. 

The only rational conclusion is that the 
gospels thus early received as authoritative, 
translated, and combined into a harmony, were 
so received and prepared for use because they 
are genuine — written by the persons whose 
names they have borne from the first; and 
that they had the stamp of apostolic approval. 



IV. 

THE FULLER LIGHT FROM MOUNT SINAI 

At Cambridge, England, there live two 
ladies who may well be numbered among the 
heroines of our times. Distinguished as schol- 
ars at one of the world's chief centers of learn- 
ing, instrumental in securing, by their munifi- 
cence, the establishment there of the youngest 
of its sisterhood of colleges, and surrounded 
by all that could contribute to social enjoy- 
ment and the pleasures of learned ease, they 
have yet endured hardships and faced dangers 
from which most men would shrink, to accom- 
plish a great work for the benefit of our own 
and succeeding generations. 

In recent years many discoveries have been 
made which serve to throw welcome light on 
that most interesting of all books, the Bible ; 
but few of these surpass in interest and im- 
portance those made by the twin sisters, Mrs. 
Lewis and Mrs. Gibson of Cambridge, in Feb- 
ruary, 1892. Of these discoveries the most 
important was that of a Syriac manuscript 

84 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 85 

containing the four gospels ; a manuscript more 
than fourteen centuries old, a copy of a Syriac 
version made, as very eminent scholars think, 
not many years after the death of the Apostle 
John. The manuscript was complete with 
the exception of a few of the vellum leaves 
which had been lost. 

It is interesting to notice the train of events 
which led these ladies to make their journey 
to Mount Sinai. 

Prof. Eendel Harris had made the discovery 
of the long-lost Ajpology of Aristides in the 
library of this convent in 1889. He was led 
to make his researches in that place by the 
fact that the indefatigable efforts of Tischen- 
dorf had resulted in the discoverv there, in 
1859, of the Sinaitic Codex, which is consid- 
ered by many scholars the very oldest copy of 
the Bible in existence, not excepting even the 
Vatican Codex, at Eome. 

Tischendorf had seen some leaves of this 
celebrated manuscript in a wastebasket in the 
convent in 1844 ; and now, under the author- 
ity of the Czar of Russia, he had come again 
to m^ake an exhaustive search for the re- 
mainder of the Codex of which he saw that 
they formed a part. After several weeks of 
fruitless effort he was about to depart. He 



86 Neio Light on the Neiv Testament 

had ordered his Bedawin to have his drome- 
daries ready for the return journey ; when, 
taking a walk in the evening with the steward 
of the convent among the surpassingly inter- 
esting scenes of Sinai, he was invited, on re- 
turning, to take tea in the latter's cell. He 
had been speaking, probably, of his disappoint- 
ment in not finding the remainder of the copy 
of the Septuagint, a fragment of which he had 
seen in the wastebasket fifteen years before, 
when the steward casually remarked that he 
too had been interested in reading the Septua- 
gint lately, and, going to a corner of the cell 
brought back a bulkly volume wrapped in a 
red cloth, and laid it in Tischendorf's hands. 
The scholar, after the first glance, was assured 
that he had before him the long-sought treas- 
ure. Here were the leaves matching those he 
had seen on his former visit, and containing a 
large part of the rest of the Old Testament, 
together with the New, to which were ap- 
pended the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shej)- 
herd of Hermas. 

But, Prof. Eendel Harris was not the only 
one whose zeal for discovery was awakened 
and stimulated by Tischendorf's success. Mrs. 
Lewis tells us that in early girlhood, the desire 
came upon her to visit this old convent, 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 87 

founded by Justinian at Mount Sinai, and that 
when many years afterwards, the way was 
opened for her to go, it was with something 
like assurance that some important discovery 
would be the result. 

Mrs. Lewis and her sister, Mrs. Gibson, 
seem, providentially, to have received a train- 
ing, from childhood on, by which they were 
fitted to do their remarkable work for the 
world. The children of a wealthy Scotch 
gentleman, their education was very carefully 
conducted by competent instructors under the 
direction and supervision of their father. 
They, probably, early exhibited a love for lan- 
guages, with a facility in acquiring a knowl- 
edge of them ; and, to encourage them in these 
pursuits, as soon as they learned a language 
well, they were allowed, as a reward, to make 
a journey, and spend some time among the 
people who spoke it. Thus it came about, 
doubtless, that in later years they could con- 
verse with equal ease, with ecclesiastics who 
spoke modern Greek, and Bedawin, whose 
talk, during their many camel journeys through 
the desert, was in Arabic. 

But the account of the journey to Mount 
Sinai, along the track of the Exodus of Israel, 
would better be told in Mrs. Lewis's own words : 



88 New Light on the New Testament 

^'The project of visiting Sinai came first 
into my mind in early girlhood, when my 
future brother-in-law, Mr. James Young Gib- 
son, traveled by Sinai and Petra to Jerusalem 
in 1865, and his glowing descriptions of desert 
scenery were forever haunting my memor3^ 
It was revived after a very successful journey, 
which my sister and I made through Greece 
in 1883. The hospitality which we had re- 
ceived from Greek monks, and the pleasant 
intercourse which we had enjoyed with Greek 
ecclesiastics, emboldened us to think that a 
visit to the Sinai Convent would be profitable, 
and that perhaps our knowledge of Arabic 
might facilitate our intercourse with the Bed- 
awin who would escort us thither. I made an 
attempt to carry out this design in 1886, but I 
got no farther than ' Uyun Musa, being de- 
terred by apprehensions about the health of a 
lady friend who was traveling with me.' 

'' After my marriage in 1887 to the Eev. 
Samuel Savage Lewis, of Corpus Christi Col- 
lege, Cambridge, we made several Oriental 
journeys together; but I had to relinquish all 
thoughts of Sinai, as my husband was bound 
to residence in his college during February, 
the only season of the year when a desert 
journey is compatible with health." 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 89 

Mr. Lewis died suddenly in 1891, and Mr. 
James Y. Gibsonj the husband of her sister 
had died also. In the summer of this year the 
Syriac text of Professor Harris's then new dis- 
covery, the Apology of Aristides^ was pub- 
lished. Mrs. Lewis became much interested 
in this defense of the early Christians, which, 
Eusebius informs us, the Greek philosopher, 
Aristides, who had become a Christian, pre- 
sented to the Emperor, Hadrian, when he 
came to Athens to be initiated in the Eleusin- 
ian Mysteries in the eighth year of his reign, 
i. ^., in 124 or 125 of our era. She gave her- 
self to earnest study of the Syriac, especially 
in the ancient Estrangelo character, which her 
knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, both lan- 
guages of the same family, made quite easy. 
Rev. E. H. Kennett of Queen's College was 
her instructor. 

Meeting with the wife of Professor Harris 
with whom she had been very slightly ac- 
quainted before this, she told her that she was 
busily engaged in the study of the Apology in 
the Syriac, and that she intended to go to 
Mount Sinai. Dr. Harris immediately called 
and taught the sisters to photograph with his 
own camera to prepare them for their work 
there, and, to use Mrs. Lewis's words, "ex- 



90 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

pressed the opinion so decidedly that there 
were treasures in the convent which he had 
not thoroughly examined, that we both looked 
forward to our journey with the brightest ex- 
pectations. For several weeks I dreamed of 
the dark closet so vividly described to me by 
Dr. Harris, in which lay the two mysterious 
chests full of manuscripts, and to which access 
was only to be obtained by propitiating the 
reverend recluses who owned them. So 
strongly were we impressed with the idea that 
we were going to discover something, that the 
night before our departure when the Master of 
Corpus (Dr. Perowne) and Mr. Kennett both 
called to say farewell, they actually speculated 
on what the discovery was to be; and Mr. 
Kennett expressed a hope that it might be the 
Harmony of the Four Qospels (or Diatessaron) 
written by Tatian in the second century." 
[The epoch-making discovery of this remark- 
able work in an Arabic translation had been 
made in the Vatican Library a few years be- 
fore this. The hope was that the original 
Syriac might be found.] Several Oriental 
scholars were invited to accompany Mrs. Lewis 
and her sister, Mrs. Gibson to Mount Sinai, but 
all efforts in this direction having failed, the 
two sisters braved the journey without them. 



The Fuller Light from 3Tount Sinai 91 

Dr. Rendel Harris, however, though unable to 
go with them at this time, did much to pre- 
pare for and further their success. Says Mrs. 
Lewis: ''Dr. Harris very kindly ordered a 
half-plate camera for us with all its appurte- 
nances, and also designed a manuscript stand 
for our use to obviate some of the difficulties 
which he had experienced." 

The journey was by way of Cairo, and an 
introduction to the patriarch of Alexandria 
secured one from him, or rather, from his 
representative (he himself being absent), to 
the Archbishop of Mount Sinai, who received 
them most kindly. This insured their favor- 
able reception at the St. Catherine Convent on 
Mount Sinai ; which is thus described, after 
mention of incidents of the journey : — 

"Next day we climbed the pass of Nug 
Hawa on foot, followed by our dromedaries. 
Soon the peak of Eas Sufsafeh burst on our 
view, and we stood on the great plain of Er- 
Rahah, just before the mountain which burned 
with fire, where the voice of God was heard 
in thunder by the multitude beneath. At 
length, the convent appeared in view, nestling 
in a narrow valley, surrounded by a walled 
garden, and overlooked on the one hand by the 
cliffs of Jebel Mousa, and on the other, by a 



92 New Light on the New Testament 

mountain named after two Greek saints, 
Galakteon and Episteme. 

" While our tents were being pitched beside 
a well of delicious water, amid the cypresses, 
olives, and flowering almond trees of the gar- 
den, we were received b}'^ the Hegoumenos, or 
prior, and by Galakteon, the librarian, whose 
eyes sparkled with sincere pleasure when he 
read our letter to himself from Mr. Rendel 
Harris, ' The world is not so large after all,' 
he exclaimed, ' when we can have real friends 
in such distant lands.' " 

This aged and amiable librarian gave them 
not only the fullest liberty to examine the 
treasures of which he was the custodian, but 
all possible personal assistance. " On Monday, 
February 8th," Mrs. Lewis continues, " we 
worked for seven hours in the library, begin- 
ning at 9 A. M. The manuscripts were very 
much scattered, some Greek ones being in the 
show library, and the Arabic partly there, 
and partly in a little room halfway up a dark 
stair. 

^' The Syriac ones, and those supposed to be 
the most ancient, are partly in this room, and 
partly in a dark closet approached through a 
room almost as dark. There they repose in 
two closed boxes, and cannot be seen without 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 93 

a lighted candle. They have, at different 
times, been stored in vaults beneath the con- 
vent for safety, when attacks were threatened 
by the Bedawin. 

"They were there exposed to damp and 
then allowed to dry without any care. It is a 
wonder that the strong parchment and clearly 
written letters have, in so many cases, with- 
stood so many adverse influences. 

" Galakteon gave us every facility for pho- 
tographing. He spent hours holding books 
open for us, or deciphering pages of the Sep- 
tuagint. The fact that the English should 
be so anxious for a correct version of the 
sacred writings as to have sheets of paper 
printed on purpose for scholars to collate them 
with all the extant manuscripts, filled the 
monks with a profound respect. The only 
drawback to our comfort was the bitterly 
cold wind. As there was no glass in the 
library windows, we had some difficulty in 
keeping ourselves warm. This we could only 
do by a smart walk out of the narrow wady." 

It was among these ill-kept manuscripts on 
vellum that the one now known as The Sina- 
itie or Lewis pali7npsest^ was found. As we 
shall see farther on, Mrs. Lewis thinks, that 
owing to a more recent discovery connected 



94 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

with its history, it should be renamed. The 
Antiochene palimpsest. 

She tells, us, ''I had never before seen a 
palimpsest, but my father had often related to 
us wonderful stories of how the old monks, 
when vellum had become scarce and paper was 
not yet invented, scraped away the writing 
from the pages of their books and wrote 
something new on the top of it; and how 
after the lapse of ages, the old ink was revived 
by the action of the common air, and the old 
words peeped up again ; and how a text of 
Plato had come to light in this curious way." 

Among other manuscripts they found one of 
538 pages, a palimpsest, written in Syriac. 
Many of its leaves were glued together, and 
some had to be separated by the woman-like 
expedient of holding them over the steam of a 
teakettle. The eyes of these sisters were 
probably the first that had looked on these old 
characters, one set of them almost hidden be- 
hind another, for many centuries. Says Mrs. 
Lewis : — 

''I saw at once that this manuscript con- 
tained two writings, both in the same ancient 
Estrangelo character, which I had been study- 
ing; that the upper writing was the biograph- 
ies of women saints, and bore its own date, 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 95 

which I read, 1,009 years after Alexander, A. 
D. 697 ; and that the underwriting was the 
gospels. The latter was written in two col- 
umns, one of which always projected onto the 
margin of the upper writing, so that many of its 
words could be easily read, and every word 
distinctly belonged to the sacred narrative. I 
pointed this out to my sister, and, as if to 
make assurance doubly sure, I showed her also 
that at the top of almost every page stood the 
title 'Evangelium, of Matthew, of Mark,' or 
'of Luke.' I felt sure that this text of the 
gospels must be at least 200 years older than 
the one which superseded (or sat upon) it, and 
could not therefore be later than the fifth 
century. . . . 

" My reasons for placing a high value on the 
palimpsest were noted down in my journal, 
under date of February 11th, and were after- 
wards embodied in an account of our journey 
which was printed for The Presbyterian 
Chicrchman of June, July, and August, before 
we had asked any of our friends to examine 
the gospel text." 

It is amusing to learn from Mrs. Lewis's ac- 
count, of how trivial a possibility was dreaded 
which might destroy all the fruits of their 
photographic labors. That dread was that 



9B 



New Light on the New Testament 



the customs officials might mistake the rolled 
films containing their photographs for rolls of 
tobacco and should let in the light and destroy 
them. This, happily, did not occur. 

Though Mrs. Lewis understood that the dis- 
covery was one of great importance, it was 
many months before even she came to under- 
stand how very important it was, and what a 
place it was soon to take among the irrefraga- 
ble testimonies to the genuineness of the four 
gospels. A severe illness which Mrs. Gibson 
suffered after the return of the sisters to their 
home in Cambridge delayed the critical exam- 
ination of the manuscript for a considerable 
time. On July 15th of the year of the dis- 
covery, 1892, they invited a company of friends 
to luncheon and, before the departure of Mr. 
and Mrs. F. C. Burkitt, who were among 
them, brought some of the photographs and 
spread them on the piano for the inspection of 
the young Syriac scholar. Mrs. Lewis told 
him that the underwriting was Syriac Gospels, 
and hoped that he might be able " with his 
keen young eyes " to decipher them. He be- 
came deeply interested and asked her permis- 
sion to take about a dozen of the photographs 
home with him for careful examination. She 
readily assented to this request, and, on the 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 97 

second day after this, received from Mrs. Bur- 
kitt the following note : — 

'^12 Harvey Road. 
"My Dear Mes. Lewis: — Frank is in a state of the 
highest excitement. He wrote down a part of the palimp- 
sest last night, and has been in to Dr. Bensley's with it, and 
they have discovered it is a part of the Cureton Syriac. Do 
yon know, only one copy exists! Yon can imagine Frank's 
glee! He has jnst been in to tell me, and run baok to the 
Bensleys'. I thought you would be interested and write at 
once. I am yours affectionately, 

A. Peesis Buekitt." 

On the day after the receipt of the note a 
meeting of those most interested in the dis- 
covery was held at the house of Professor 
Bensley, and as it was clear that the manu- 
script could not be fully and accurately copied 
except from the original at Mount Sinai, a 
second expedition was decided on for the ac- 
complishment of that purpose. Prof. Eendel 
Harris was invited by the sisters to accom- 
pany them, together with Professor Bensley 
and Mr. F. 0. Burkitt and their wives. The 
party rendezvoused at Suez on June 27th and 
proceeded to their destination, the convent of 
St. Catherine, where they were most cordially 
received by the monks. 

" The next morning," says Mrs. Lewis, " Ga- 
lakteon tottered into what was called the arch- 



98 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

bishop's room, where the Syriac books were 
kept, and asked what we wished to see first." 
The reply, of course was, ''all the books 
photographed last year." The Palestinian 
Zectionary which has since been edited and 
published by Mrs. Lewis in a very elaborate 
and elegant form, was intrusted to her that 
she might work on it in her tent, and the 
palimpsest was divided between the three gen- 
tlemen for decipherment and transcription so 
far as this very difficult task might prove pos- 
sible. 

While the discovery of the palimpsest has 
given Mrs. Lewis celebrity among scholars the 
world over, her edition of the Lectionary, has 
obtained for her the honorary degree of Doc- 
tor of Philosophy from the united faculty of 
Halle- Wittenberg, and the name of her sister, 
Mrs. Gibson, was honorably mentioned in her 
diploma. 

Many readers may not be able to understand 
wh}^ Mr. Burkitt should have been excited by 
his supposed discovery that the palimpsest was 
a copy of the Cureton Syriac manuscript of 
the gospels. It was not simply because there 
was but one copy of this fragmentary manu- 
script of the gospels which was brought by 
Archdeacon Tattam from the Nitrian desert 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 99 

and deposited with others which he brought 
with it in the British Museum in 1842, but be- 
cause Canon Cureton who discovered its char- 
acteristics and published it in 1858, had come 
to the conclusion that it was the oldest manu- 
script of the gospels in Syriac discovered up 
to that time. The fact that it was fragmentary 
would make the discovery of a second copy of 
greater importance from the fact that passages 
missing in the first copy might be supplied 
from the second. The Cureton manuscript 
had, for instance, only a few verses of the 
Gospel of Mark, and another copy might con- 
tain all of that gospel. 

The scholars had not worked long at their 
task when they found that though the text be- 
fore them had points of likeness to that of the 
Cureton manuscript, it was not a second copy 
of the same. Mrs. Lewis says: "It was of 
the same character, but more concise, and ap- 
parently more ancient by half a century." 

She also says : " Mr. Harris pronounced it 
to be by no means a difficult palimpsest, but 
the pages varied greatly in distinctness, and 
though even I could trace the words, being of 
their natural size, as I could not do in my 
photographs, there were many from which the 
ink of the underwriting had faded leaving 

LofC. 



100 New Light on the New Testament 

only faint indications on the vellum from 
which words could be traced. Add to this 
that many of these words were covered by 
the dark upperwriting which was, happily, of 
a different color, and that most of it had to be 
read between the lines, and my readers may 
appreciate the difficulty of the task which was 
to be undertaken." 

Before going to Mount Sinai the second time 
Mrs. Lewis procured four bottles of a chemical 
compound w^hich was of great use in this diffi- 
cult w^ork of deciphering the manuscripts. 
She did not at first use it. " For ten days," 
says she, ''I had to restrain my impatience 
about using this ; but on the eleventh, I hap- 
pened to open a large volume of Mar Isaac's 
discourses, w^hich I had known on our former 
visit, and which contained many passages so 
faded as to be quite illegible. I asked Galak- 
teon to let me restore one of these, with the 
result that it came up of a brilliant hue of dark 
green, and he was so astonished that he asked 
me to paint up the whole volume and then to 
try my ' scent-bottle,' as it was called, on other 
hoary documents. 

" How triumphant I felt when he gave me 
permission to touch up the palimpsest, though 
only in a few places where it could not be read 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 101 

otherwise ! Professor Bensley at first disap- 
proved of the proceeding, but as both his 
fellow-workers gave my brush the warmest 
welcome, he was induced, after a few days to 
ask for it himself, and many a blank margin 
thus became covered with very distinct writ- 
ing." 

Forty days of hard work were spent by the 
indefatigable scholars in research among the 
treasures of the convent, in deciphering and 
transcribing. But though very laborious days, 
they must have been very happy ones. The 
joy of discovery, the gratification of finding, 
day by day, increasing proof of the inestima- 
ble value of the chief treasure which had been 
brought to light, the reflex energies normally 
employed, — in this case, the highest energies of 
noble minds, — the daily intercourse in work 
and rest, and above all, the wonderful sur- 
roundings; scenes of the exquisite beauty of 
subtropical foliage, set off by the grandeur of 
those bare rocky heights, sublime, solitary, 
awe-inspiring, from which God once vouch- 
safed the most august revelation which the 
human race has ever received, must have filled 
those days of strenuous toil with a unique in- 
terest and inspiration. The time must have 
been happily spent as it passed and will. 



102 New Light on the New Testament 

doubtless, be a bright spot in the memories of 
those who had the privilege of taking part in 
this great work. Yet, as is often the case in 
our experience, the memories of this happy 
period will always be chastened by the recol- 
lection of sorrow. Professor Bensley fell sick 
in Rome, on the return journey, and died three 
days after reaching his home at Cambridge, 
and, a few weeks later, the old librarian Ga- 
lakteon, who had done so much to forward the 
plans of his European friends, was gathered to 
his fathers, " as a shock of corn cometh in in 
his season." 

After all the learned labor expended by the 
distinguished scholars at Mount Sinai, many 
passages were left undeciphered, and others 
were subjects of conjecture rather than of cer- 
tain knowledge. This being the case, Mrs. 
Lewis and Mrs. Gibson made a third journey 
to the scene of the discovery in January, 1895. 

The Archbishop of Mount Sinai, Porphyrios^ 
offered them every facility for investigating, 
but when they asked for the palimpsest, the 
new librarian after a vain search, informed 
them that it was not to be found in the library. 
This was surprising, because Mrs. Lewis had 
provided a handsome box for the manuscript 
that it might be preserved from injury in the 



The Fuller Light from 3Iount Sinai 103 

future, and Mrs. Bensley had prepared a silk 
cover for it with the same design. It was 
known to the sisters that some pages of other 
manuscripts had been stolen from the convent, 
and it now looked as if the palimpsest of the 
gospels might have met a similar fate. We 
can well believe that, as Mrs. Lewis says, they 
had " a bad quarter of an hour." But in the 
midst of their dismay, Euthumios, the suc- 
cessor of Galakteon, was seen approaching 
with the manuscript enveloped in its silk 
cover, and their anxiety was immediately 
turned into joy. During this visit, and an- 
other which the sisters made to the convent 
in 1897, the palimpsest was examined with the 
greatest care, and many of the gaps in the first 
transcription were filled. Many of the former 
readings were satisfactorily verified, while in 
some cases, corrections were made. 

A New Discovery 

By the almost incredible labor which had 
now been bestowed on this most interesting 
copy of the gospels, it would seem that it must 
have been made to yield all its secrets to the 
learned investigators. Strange as it may 
seem, however, all these examinations of the 
original manuscript failed to bring to light an 



104 New Light on the New Testament 

important fact in the history of the palimpsest 
which has been made knbwn by the photo- 
graphs of its last two pages. This fact is that 
it was not made a palimpsest at Sinai, but at 
Antioch, where " the disciples were first called 
Christians." ^ 

For a full description of the palimpsest and 
its peculiar features we may go to the series 
of articles now passing through The Exjyository 
Times on '' AVhat have we gained in the 
Sinaitic Palimpsest." The palimpsest itself 
is, also, accessible to the English readers in a 
translation made by the discoverer.^ 

As to the palimpsest's testimony for the 
gospels, it is only necessary to mention a few 
facts, to see. 

One of these is that it contains our four 
gospels, and no others, indicating that the so- 
called A;pocryphal Gospels^ were unknown, or 
at least, unacknowledged as having any au- 
thority, when this translation was made. 



^ For an account of this remarkable discovery as to the 
place where the four gospels were turned into a palimpsest 
by writing over them the lives of women saints by "John, 
the Recluse,'' see the article, The earlier Home of the Sinaitic 
Palimpsest, in The Expositor for June, 1900. 

2 For a fuller account of the discovery of the palimpsest 
and of the journey to Mount Sinai the reader is referred to 
Mrs. Gibson's "How the Codex was Found," and Mrs. 
Lewis's, *' In the Shadow of Sinai." 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 105 

Another is, that it must have been made 
very early. The Diatessaron^ a harmony of 
the four gospels, prepared by Tatian, probably 
in the decade 150-160 is found to contain a 
number of readings, or turns of expression, 
found only in this Sinaitic Palimpsest^ indi- 
cating that this version (or else one from 
which it was, in part, copied), must have been 
in existence before the Diatessaron, 

This version is a translation of the whole of 
the four gosjpels^ and the text has marked 
characteristics of the earliest Greek manu- 
•scripts : " a text," as Professor Harris, in his 
able article in The Contemporary^ November, 
1894, remarks, " that often agrees with all that 
is most ancient in Greek manuscripts, a text 
which the advanced critic will at once ac- 
knowledge to be, after allowance has been 
made for a few serious blemishes, superior in 
quality to all extant copies, with a very few 
exceptions." These "serious blemishes," as 
he considers them, are all found in three 
verses of the first chapter of Matthew. 

This shows that the theory of the gradual 
evolution of the gospels is a dream. 

Another fact to be considered is that this is 
a translation^ implying an original from which 
it was translated, existing therefore still 



106 Neio Light on the New Testament 

earlier than this version which Professor 
Harris concludes " must have been made far 
back in the second century." 

It is interesting in this connection, to 
notice that Prof. Adolf Harnack of Berlin, 
though viewing the question from his far- 
from-orthodox standpoint, has at last ac- 
knowledged the force of the accumulating 
evidence that all the gospels were written 
within the first century. Kecent discoveries 
have forced him to this conclusion ; and, after 
mentioning the Apology of Aristides and The 
Diatessaron of Tatian^ he says : — 

"But of still greater value was the find 
which we owe to a learned Scotch lady, Mrs. 
Lewis. . . . 

"As the text is almost completely preserved 
this Syrus Sinaiticus is one of the most im- 
portant witnesses ; nay it is extremely probable 
that it is the most important witness, for 
our gospels " (see his article in Preussische 
JahrUtcher, May, 1898). 

Standing, like Harnack, in the van of 
German scholarship, Prof. Theodor Zahn of 
Erlangen has given his conclusions as to 
the dates of the gospels, respectively, as 
follows : — 

Matthew, in Aramaic, 62 ; in Greek, 85 ; 



The Fuller Light from Mount Sinai 107 

Mark (prepared) 64; Mark (published) 67; 
Luke 75 ; John 80-90. Harnack's dates are 
Mark, 65-70 ; Matthew, 70-75 ; Luke 78-90 ; 
John, '' not later than the beginning of the 
second century." ^ 

Thus, the two most noted New Testament 
scholars in Germany, the leaders of the two 
opposing scholars of criticism, have by inde- 
pendent researches from different standpoints, 
been brought to almost identical conclusions 
as to the dates of the gospels ; dates not in- 
consistent with the authorship of contem- 
poraries of Christ. Harnack, brought, or, I 
may say, forced, to this conclusion by the ex- 
ternal evidence of recent discoveries, finds it 
confirmed by the internal evidence of. the 
documents themselves, and says : — 

"In their essential substance, the gospels 
belong to the first, the Jewish, aspect of 
Christianity, that brief epoch which may be 
denoted as the palsBontological." 

The views of such critics as Abbott and 
Schmiedel published in the Encyclopedia Bib- 

^ Blass thinks that Luke wrote his gospel during the im- 
prisonment of Paul at Csesarea A. D. 54-56, according to his 
reckoning, 57-59 according to that of Ramsay. See The 
Homiletic Review, December, 1900. "Pauline Chronology," 
by W. M. Ramsay, and The Churchman (London) "The 
Western Text of St. Luke '• by W. Harloe Dundas. 



108 New Light on the New Testament 

lica are due to vision distorted and judgment 
warped by the prepossessions of their own 
minds. Of the attack of these critics and 
others like them, Canon Gore (now Bishop of 
Worcester), himself a higher critic, well re- 
marks : "Now, it is easy to magnify the im- 
portance of the movement, and even to over- 
estimate its men. It has no discovery in early 
Christian literature to start from. The great 
discoveries of those years have all gone to- 
ward the confirmation of the traditional 
faith." . . . 

"The}^ are discovered constantly asserting 
that things ' cannot have been as they are rep- 
resented in the gospels,' either because they do 
not square with the writer's own conception of 
Jesus and his times, or because they contra- 
dict some of his philosophical ideas, such as 
the impossibility of miracle." 

Even Wendt has announced his conclusion 
that, " critical inquiry has led, though not im- 
mediately in its first attempts, yet gradually 
in the course of time, to results whereby the 
historical picture of Jesus has lost nothing, but 
only gained." 

And David Smith of Tulliallan, who quotes 
this saying of Wendt, gives this statement of 
the results of that New Testament criticism by 



The Fuller Light from 3Iount Sinai 109 

which so many have been alarmed and some 
have been robbed of their faith : — 

" The history of New Testament criticism is 
the record of the rise and fall of a thousand 
theories, each influential and seemingly final, 
for a brief space, and each abandoned in its 
turn; and the New Testament has outlived 
them all, as it will outlive their successors to 
the end of time. Ezripavd-rj 6 ^opro^^^^'^ etc. 

Yes, truly, ''The grass withereth, and the 
flower thereof falleth away : but the word of 
the Lord endureth forever." 

These words forcibly emphasize the famous 
reply of Beza to Henry of Navarre : '' It is 
true, sire, that it is the part of the Church of 
God to receive blows and return none ; but, re- 
member that it is an anvil that has used up 
many hammers " (a use beaucoup de mar- 
teaux). 

The blows of the hammers are falling still, 
but the " anvil " is as firmly fixed as ever, and 
we may be sure that in God's good providence 
the criticism of the Scriptures now so preva- 
lent will be overruled for the furtherance of 
the gospel in the end. Criticism may develop, 
for one thing, into a sane Biblical Theology, 
which will lead to the deeper and more en- 
thusiastic study of the Bible, and the most 



110 New Light on the New Testament 

searching investigations will tend to establish 
confidence in it, though in some persons, that 
confidence may for the time, be weakened or 
destroyed. 

" Truth's like a torch : the more it's shook 
it shines," and we may believe with well 
grounded assurance that the revelation God 
has given will give forth its light more clearly 
through the discussion of it, and that the hand 
of criticism, w^hich some feared would extin- 
guish it, grown more wisely skillful, will but 
make it shine more brightly ; yea, wall put it 
on a pinnacle to send forth more clearly its 
beacon light for the salvation of a lost world. 



TWIN LIGHTS FROM ATHENS 

I. Aristides and Quadratus, the Com- 
panion Apologists 

Justin Martyr had stood in the Church's 
view, for ages, at the head of the brave band 
of defenders of the faith, the apologists of the 
second century ; but the discovery of the Ajjol- 
ogy of Aristides in the St. Catherine Convent 
in 1889 has given to its author the first place. 
Aristides now takes precedence. 

But another, perhaps still more eminent 
Christian, Quadratus, presented a defense of 
the Christians at the same time with Aristides. 

Of this event Eusebius gives the following 
account :— 

''But Trajan," [who became emperor of 
Rome before the death of the Apostle John], 
'' having held the sovereignty twenty years 
wanting six months, is succeeded in the im- 
perial office by JElius Hadrian. To him Quad- 
ratus addressed a discourse as an apology for 
the religion which we profess, because certain 

111 



112 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

malicious persons attempted to harass the 
brethren. 

" The work is still in the hands of some of 
the hrethren^ as also in our own^ from which 
any one may see evident proof of the under- 
standing of the man and of his apostolic faith." 
[Italics mine.] Indicating the early date at 
which Quadratus began his work, Eusebius 
continues : '' This writer shows the antiquitj^ 
of the age in which he lived, in these passages : 

" ' The deeds of our Saviour,' says he, ' were 
always before you, for they were true mira- 
cles ; those that were healed, those that were 
raised from the dead, who were seen, not only 
when healed and when raised, but were always 
present. They remained living a long time, 
not onlv whilst our Lord was on earth, but 
likewise when he had left the earth, so that 
soms of then}' have also lived to oitr own times.'* 
Such was Quadratus." Eusebius continues: — 

" Aristides, also, a man faithfully devoted to 
the religion we profess, like Quadratus, has 
left to posterity a defense of the faith addressed 
to Adrian. This work is, also, preserved by a 
great number, even to the present day." 

Thus, t^venty-five years after the death of 
the Apostle John, there occurred this event of 
thrilling interest. At Athens, and, possibly, 



Twin Lights from Athens 113 

on that very Mars' Hill where Paul preached, 
and where the court of the Areopagus held its 
sessions, or it may be, on the adjacent summit 
of the Acropolis, crowned with that paragon of 
architecture, the Parthenon, with its frieze of 
Phidias, its inimitable ivory and gold Athena, 
within, and its colossal Athena, without, these 
two brave men, Aristides, the Athenian philos- 
opher, who had become a Christian, and Quad- 
ratus, the evangelist, — the first, possibly a 
young man filled with enthusiasm at finding in 
the gospel a philosophy infinitely transcend- 
ing the noblest product even of the Greek in- 
tellect — the other almost certainly an old man, 
with a life of loving labors chiefly behind him, 
came to acknowledge in the most public way 
their allegiance to their Lord. This they did 
by presenting to Hadrian, the Emperor of 
Eome, a plea for their persecuted brethren and 
their much-misrepresented faith. 

The brave deed was not destined to be fruit- 
less. Not only was the " Kescript of Hadrian " 
by which the severity of the persecution was 
greatly mitigated, in all probability, a result 
of it, but it must have served to cheer and 
strengthen the persecuted Christian host that 
stood trembling behind them, its leaders, by 
its high example of Christian heroism. 



114 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

The martyrologies of the middle ages, even, 
presented the tradition of the brave and bril- 
liant deed, and now the Apology of Aristides 
has come forth from its concealment of many 
centuries as one of the witnesses to encourage 
faith, in an age of doubt. 

Eusebius tells us that the Apology of Quad- 
ratus " was in his hands and in those of some 
of the brethren."^ He gives us a specimen 
which makes us long to see the whole of it. 
The extract from it which we have indicates 
how early he had lived. Irenaeus tells of Poly- 
carp at whose feet he had sat in his youth, and 
Quadratus could probably tell of John and pos- 
sibly, even of Paul and Peter, as he was of 
those who, in the words of Eusebius, " held the 
first rank in the apostolic succession," and who 
had seen those who were the subjects of our 
Saviour's miracles. 

What a chasm this Apology of Quadratics 
if recovered, would bridge ! The half century 
from A. D. Y5 to 125 is almost a blank to us. 
"We have scarcely any particulars about it, and 
yet, in these fifty years there took place the 

^ * ' The Apology of Quadratus seems to have survived tiU 
the 6th century, for several passages are quoted in the con- 
troversy between the monk Andrew and Eusebius (86), 
Pliotius, Cod. 162."— Dr. George Salmon in Diet, of Xn. 
Biography. 



Twin Lights from Athens 115 

greatest movement of all church history since 
the days of the apostles. The letter of a 
heathen, written about twelve years after John's 
body was laid to rest at Ephesus, throws an 
interesting sidelight on it. Trajan's governor 
of Bithynia, Pliny, writing to his master, 
speaks of the heathen temples "almost de- 
serted," of "great numbers involved in the 
dangers of these persecutions," which were 
then in progress, while he asserts that " this 
contagious superstition is not confined to the 
cities only, but has spread its infection among 
the country villages." He tells Trajan of 
"this inquiry having already extended, and 
being still likely to extend to persons of all 
ages and ranks, and of both sexes." Such is the 
view of the results of this period of evangeli- 
zation which a Roman governor has from the 
outside of the Christian community, and with 
eyes hostile to it. It is the view of a con- 
temporary and one who is a very competent 
witness as far as intelligence is concerned. 

Eusebius gives, at a much later time, the 
inside view of the agencies — the human 
agencies at least — which brought about these 
wonderful results. But he had before him the 
words of earlier writers who were not only 
witnesses within the Christian circle, but 



116 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

agents in the glorious work. Eusebius knew 
of others, but he makes a more honorable men- 
tion of none than of Quadratus. He says : — 

" Of those who flourished in these times, 
Quadratus is said to have been distinguished 
for prophetical gifts. There were many others, 
also noted in these times, who held the first 
rank in the apostolic succession. These, as the 
holy disciples of such men, also built up the 
churches where foundations had been laid in 
every place by the apostles. They augmented 
the means of promulgating the gospel more and 
more, and spread the seeds of salvation and of 
the heavenly kingdom throughout the world, 
far and wide. For the most of the disciples 
at that time, animated with a more ardent love 
of the divine word, had first fulfilled the 
Saviour's precept by distributing their sub- 
stance to the needy. Afterwards, leaving 
their country, they performed the office of 
evangelists to those who had not yet heard 
the faith ; whilst with a noble ambition, they 
delivered to them the books of the holy gospel. 
After laying the foundation of the gospel in 
foreign parts, as the particular object of their 
mission, and after appointing others as shep- 
herds of the flocks, and committing to these 
the care of those that had been recently intro- 



Twin Lights from Athens 117 

duced, they went again to other regions and 
nations, with the grace and cooperation of 
God. The Holy Spirit also wrought many 
wonders, as yet, through them, so that as soon 
as the gospel was heard, men voluntarily, and 
in crowds, eagerly embraced the true faith 
with their whole minds." 

Oh, glorious, golden age of Christianity, 
prophecy and promise, we trust, of a still more 
glorious golden age to come, when, after these 
times of worldliness and dearth, God will pour 
out his spirit upon all flesh ! Quadratus had 
been, perhaps, for fifty years among these 
scenes so blessed and yet so full at times of 
suffering. Now is a time of suffering, and the 
old hero comes with his defense, and along 
with the philosopher Aristides, appeals to the 
emperor in behalf of the Christians. God 
seems to have blessed the brave deed. The 
" Rescript of Hadrian " to Fundanus, the pro- 
consul of Asia, was issued after it, command- 
ing that no Christian should be punished with- 
out examination and proof. 

Now, what a boon would the full account 
of this glorious and j^et terrible half century, 
written by a contemporary and thoroughly 
competent witness, be ! For one reason one 
Avould like to live fifty years more. It is to 



118 New Light on the New Testament 

be hoped that within that time the long lost 
Apology of Qxmdratus will be discovered, as 
that of Aristides has been already. Eusebius 
had it before him when he wrote his history, 
and gives us a very appetizing and very tanta- 
lizing morsel. What a flood of light would 
the rediscovered Apology shed on this glorious 
and yet almost wholly unknown half century ! 
Before this period we have the simplicity of 
apostolic Christianity. Soon after it we find 
the beginnings, at least of that intricate and 
artificial ecclesiasticism, which so sadly trans- 
formed and deformed the pure religion of 
Christ. The multiform errors of Gnosticism^ 
that " hydra-headed monster," as Hippoly tus 
calls it, that with the many forms of heathen 
philosophies and religions, served to adulterate 
and ruin so much of the nominal Christianity 
of the time, soon came upon the scene. The 
influences w^hich w^rought the sad change 
were working, doubtless, in secret, through all 
this long period, but we cannot trace them. 
All is dim and indistinct, and to some extent 
uncertain, through all this tract of time. We 
know something of some characters in it, but 
they are to us at this distance like men seen 
through a mist, across wide gorges among 
mountain heights — magnified, shadowy forms, 



Twin Lights from Athens 119 

standing, we cannot tell just where, and mov- 
ing, we scarcely know whither. 

What a boon a flood of clear light on this 
period would be ! That light the Apology of 
Quadratics^ if discovered, will probably give in 
such a way as no other known writing does. 
He was a man qualified to tell of these times 
intelligently and reliably ; and from the quo- 
tations of Eusebius from his Apology and from 
what Eusebius says of him, we see that he must 
have told much that would be intenselv inter- 
esting to us after almost eighteen centuries. 

II. The Apology of Aeistides Dis- 

COVEEEI) 

Let us now turn to the Apology which 
Aristides addressed to Hadrian. 

We can only indulge hopes of the discovery 
of the Apology of Qtiadratus ; that of his 
companion apologist is now in our hands, 
coming to us in two languages, and in two 
different forms, in one of which we have it in 
its entirety, while, in the other, we possess far 
the greater part of it. 

The Apology of Aristides was, for ages, 
supposed to have finally perished, with a vast 
mass of the writings of antiquity. 



120 New Light on the New Testament 

Jerome, about the year 420, mentions the 
Apology of Aristides, and says that it was 
presented to the Emperor Hadrian at the same 
time with the Apology of Quadratus / that it 
was extant in his day, and was afterwards 
imitated by Justin Martyr. There is no later 
mention of its existence ; but what has been 
called " a faint reflection " of the earlier testi- 
mony is found in the mediaeval martyrologies 
as, in them, the 31st of August is given as the 
saints' day of " The blessed Aristides [to use 
the words of the old record] most renowned 
for faith and wisdom, who presented books on 
the Christian religion to the Prince Hadrian, 
and most brilliantly proclaimed in the presence 
of the emperor himself how that Christ Jesus 
is the only God."^ 

In the seventeenth century there was a 
rumor that the Apology was in some monastic 
libraries in Greece, but the search made for it 
'was fruitless. 

In the spring of the year 1889 Prof. J. 
Rendel Harris, the distinguished scholar and 
lecturer of Clare College, Cambridge, found, in 
the library of the St. Catherine Convent on 
Mount Sinai, where Tischendorf had thirty 

^ We find the Apology to be a powerfnl argument against 
polytheism and for the unity -in-trinity of God. 



Twin Lights from Athens 121 

years before discovered the Codex Sinaiticus^ 
the long lost Ajpology of Aristides. It was in 
the Syriac language, in a manuscript which 
Prof. Harris refers to the seventh century. 
Eleven years before this, the Mechitarist 
scholars in their convent of S. Lazaro, near 
Venice, had published a Latin translation of 
what was thought to be (and afterwards proved 
to be) the first two chapters of the Aj)ology in 
the Armenian language. This fragment had 
been declared spurious by Eenan and other 
scholars, because it contained a term describing 
the virgin as the ^' God-bearer " — a term which 
belonged to a much later age than that in which 
the Apology of Aristides was written. The 
original fragment was in the Armenian lan- 
guage, as has been said, and after fuller ex- 
amination, the use of this term was found to 
have been due to a mistake of the Latin trans- 
lator, and when Harris discovered the whole 
Apology in Syriac, this Armenian fragment 
was found to correspond with it, and its 
genuineness was vindicated. After the happy 
discovery of the Apology it was found, almost 
entire, in a slightly modified form, but in the 
original Greek, imbedded and concealed, like 
a jewel in common earth, in a strange story of 
the middle ages, entitled Barlaam and 



122 New Light on the New Testament 

Josaphat—^ tale of such interest, in the 
absence of anything like the modern novel, 
that it was translated into some twenty lan- 
guages, Hebrew and Icelandic being of the 
number. So seriously was the romance taken 
by the Church of Eome that Barlaam and 
Josaphat were accorded a place in the calen- 
dar of saints— a calendar, however, where 
much else equally as fictitious may be found. 

The brilliant corypheus of the Eitschlians, 
Prof. Adolf Harnack, in a notable article in 
the Prussische Jalirhucher^ said : " The dis 
covery of this Apology is a find of the first 
importance." A glance at its contents will 
convince you that this is true. The Apology 
of Aristides is a witness not only for the 
gospels, but for the whole New Testament. 
The name New Testament occurs a little later, 
as we see from a quotation in Eusebius (H. E. 
V. lY). 

III. The Apology and the New 
Testamein't 

In examining the Apology of Aristides as to 
its dependence on the I^ew Testament^ there 
are several things to be considered. One is 
that it is brief, the translations of the Syriac 
and of the Greek, printed side by side in the 



Tioin Lights from Athens 123 

Ante-Nicene Fathers (Vol. IX) occupying only 
seventeen pages. The translation of the 
Greek, if complete, would occupy about seven 
pages. Of these seven pages, more than three- 
fourths of the space is occupied with arguments 
against the most prominent systems of poly- 
theism, and for the unity-in-trinity of God. 
The arguments are chiefly philosophical, and 
are simply an appeal to reason. The em- 
peror addressed was a heathen, supposed, as is 
shown, to know nothing of the writings of the 
Christians, which he is importuned again and 
again to read. Hence we should not expect 
quotations from these writings or any mention 
of the names of the writers — names which 
would be meaningless to Hadrian. 

It will be in the interest of brevity and prob- 
ably more satisfactory to the reader to refrain 
from a lengthened discussion, and present a 
sample of the Apology^ the whole of which 
may not be accessible to some. Let us take 
the fifteenth section in which Aristides speaks 
of the origin of the Chistians, and refutes the 
heathen charges of immorality against them. 
We will take the translation from the Greek 
fragment as being probabl}'' more literal and 
briefer than the translation of the Syriac, 
which is itself a translation, and seemingly 



124 New Light on the New Testament 

somewhat paraphrastic.^ The first part — that 
about Christ — occurs earlier in the Syriac. 
''Now the Christians trace their origin from 
the Lord Jesus Christ, and he is acknowledged 
by the Holy Spirit to be the Son of the Most 
High God, who came down from heaven for 
the salvation of men, and being born of a pure 
virgin, unbegotten and immaculate, he assumed 
flesh and revealed himself among men that he 
might recall them to himself from their wan- 
dering after many gods. And having accom- 
plished his wonderful dispensation, by a 
voluntary choice, he tasted death on the 
cross, fulfilling an august dispensation. And 
after three days he came to life again and as- 
cended into heaven. And, if you would read, 
O King, you may judge the glory of his 
presence from the holy gospel writing as it is 
called among themselves. He had twelve dis- 
ciples who, after his ascension, went forth into 
the provinces of the whole world, and declared 
his greatness. As for instance, one of them 

^Dr. J. Armitage Robinson (now Dean of Westminster) 
edited the Greek text discovered by him in the story of 
Barlaam and Josaphat, as an appendix to Prof. Eendel 
Harris's Apology of Aristidef^^ in Texts and Studies, No. 1. 
In introducing this appendix, Professor Harris says, in a 
spirit which is as beautiful as it is rare, ' ' Need I say how 
gladly I make way for him in the appendix, which will 
really be the text itself." 



Twin Lights from Athens 126 

traversed the countries about us, proclaiming 
the doctrine of the truth. From this it is that 
they who still observe the righteousness en- 
joined by their preaching are called Chris- 
tians. 

" And these are they who more than all the 
nations on the earth have found the truth. 
For they know God the Creator and Fashioner 
of all things, through the only begotten Son 
and the Holy Spirit ; and besides him they 
worship no other God. They have the com- 
mands of the Lord Jesus Christ himself graven 
upon their hearts ; and they observe them, 
looking forward to the resurrection of the 
dead, and life in the world to come. They do 
not commit adultery nor fornication, nor bear 
false witness, nor covet the things of others ; 
they honor father and mother, and love their 
neighbors ; they judge justly, and they never 
do to others what they would not wish to 
happen to themselves,^ they appeal to those 

^ The Syriac has, also, ^' and the food which is consecrated 
to idols they do not eat. ' ' 

Dr. Purves has kindly drawn my attention to the indica- 
tion in this Apology that the text of The Acts which Aristides 
used had at that time suffered correction. The negative 
form of the ' ' golden rule ' ' here seen is noted by Seeberg, of 
Berlin, as an instance of " V^estern " corruption of Acts 
15 : 20 and 29, and Professor Harris, as is seen in his Four 
Lectures on the Western I'extj agrees with him. As this is 
found in connection with the statement that ' ' they abstain 



126 New Light on the New Testament 

who injure them, and try to win them as 
friends ; they are eager to do good to their 
enemies ; they are gentle and easy to be en- 
treated ; they abstain from all unlawful con- 
versation and from all impurity ; they despise 
not the widow nor oppress the orphan; and 
he that has, gives ungrudgingly for the main- 
tenance of him who has not. If they see a 
stranger they take him under their roof, and 
rejoice over him as over a very brother ; for 
they call themselves brethren not after the 
flesh, but after the spirit." 

When he tells the Emperor that one of the 
apostles " traversed the countries about us," 
Ave can hardly help believing that he refers to 
Paul, the apostle who first brought the gospel 
to Greece. Surely, too, it does not require a 
vivid imagination to hear, in the utterances of 
Aristides, echoes of Paul's address on Mars' 
Hill. While there are contrasts between the 
Apology of Aristides and this address, which 
we may call the Apology of Paul — contrasts 

from e\dioXo6oTa^^^ Seeberg concluded that the interpreta- 
tion was in the copy of The Acts used by Aristides. This 
would seem to indicate that The Acts was, as Seeberg says, 
"in ecclesiastical use," and that it was, even at that time, 
an '^ancient book, handed down from the apostolic age." 

My thanks are due to the Rev. T. W. Lingle, who kindly 
furnished me references from the Four Lectures to which I 
did not have access. 



Twin Lights from Athens 127 

in. which Professor Stokes, of Dublin, has 
seen a proof that The Acts was written in the 
first century — at the same time there are strik- 
ing resemblances.^ Let us look at some of 
them : — 

Paul strove earnestly to make known to his 
heathen hearers "the unknown God." This 
we see Aristides tried to do for Hadrian, and 
in doing it, presented the theology — even the 
trinitarianism — of Paul's epistles. 

Paul spoke of the folly of idolatry, and so 
does Aristides, with force and at length. 

Paul spoke of the creation of " the world 
and all things therein," and so does Aristides. 

Paul spoke of the resurrection, and so does 
Aristides. Paul spoke of the judgment, and 
of Christ as the Judge, and so does Aristides, 
in such words as these : — 

'' So shall they appear before the awful 
judgment, which through Jesus the Messiah, is 
destined to come upon the whole human race." 

Paul speaks of the great mistakes of the 
Athenians in their worship, and declares of 
God that " he is Lord of heaven and earth " 
and that he " dwelleth not in temples made 
with hands ; neither is worshiped with men's 
hands, as though he needed anything, seeing 

^ Expository New Testament, in loc. 



128 New Light on the New Testament 

he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things." 
Paul was speaking to philosophers in Athens. 
In the same Athens Aristides speaks of the 
writers and philosophers among them, thus : — 

'' Herein, too, (they err) in asserting of deity 
that any such thing as deficiency can be pres- 
ent to it, as when they say that he receives 
sacrifice and requires burnt offering and 
libation and immolations of men, and temples. 
But God is not in need, and none of these 
things are necessary to him." 

When we remember that Paul's address to 
the Epicurean and the Stoic philosophers occu- 
pied only ten verses of the seventeenth chapter 
of The Acts, and when we see such correspond- 
ences in thought and even in diction between 
the two *^ Ajpologies^'' can we resist the convic- 
tion that this passage of The Acts was in the 
mind of Aristides, just as we have^ seen that 
the fifteenth chapter was? 

It is clear that the thought of Aristides 
moved in the sphere of the gospels. The Acts, 
the epistles and The Eevelation, which consti- 
tute the New Testament. How could this 
have been so, if what he calls " the holy gos- 
pel writing" and '' their other writings " which 
he exhorts the emperor to read, and from 
which he says he derived his information, had 



Twin Lights from Athens 129 

not been the same New Testament which we 
now have ? It is perfectly safe to say that no 
objector can answer the question. 

But besides this general mark of the identity 
of the truths proclaimed by Aristides with 
those of the New Testament, there is a re- 
markable coincidence in forms of expression, 
as for instance : — 

Paul says (Col. 1 : 17), " By him all things 
consist." 

Aristides says, " Through him all things 
consist." 

Paul says the heathen " served the creature 
more than the Creator." 

Aristides says they " began to worship the 
creation more than their Creator." 

James exhorts Christians to be '' gentle, and 
easy to be entreated." 

Aristides says, " They are gentle and easy 
to be entreated." 

Paul speaks of the Jews as (Kom. 9 : 3), ^' My 
brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." 

And (Eom. 8 : 5) uses the expression " not 
after the flesh, but after the Spirit." 

Aristides says, "Brethren, not after the 
flesh, but after the Spirit." 

Peter (2 Pet. 3 : 16), speaking of the epistles 
of Paul, says : " As also in all his epistles 



130 New Light on the New Testament 

. . . in which are some things hard to be 
understood." 

Aristides having told the emperor of "the 
holy gospel writing," saj^s : " There are found 
in their other writings things which are hard 
to utter and difficult for one to narrate." ^ 

In Hebrews (2 : 5 ; 6 : 5) we find the phrase, 
" the world to come." 

Aristides speaks of those who seek " the 
world to come." 

John in The Revelation (1 : 1) speaks of " the 
things which must come to pass (r. y.) here- 
after," having already (1 : 19) received the 
command from the Saviour, '' Write . . . 
the things which shall come to pass hereafter." 

Aristides says, " Since I read in their writ- 
ings, I was fully assured of these things as 
also of things which are to come." 

Paul repeats God's promise, " I will put my 
laws into their hearts, and in their minds will 
I write them." 

Aristides says the Christians " have the 
commands of the Lord Jesus Christ himself 
graven upon their hearts." 

Paul exhorts Christians to give " not grudg- 
ingly." 

^ This expression "their other writings" occurs in the 
Syriac, but not in the Greek as we have it. 



Twin Lights from Athens 131 

Aristides says the Christian gives "un- 
grudgingly." 

Peter (1 Pet. 1 : 23) speaks of the regener- 
ated as '^ born again, not of corruptible seed, but 
of incorruptible, by the word of God, which 
liveth and abideth forever." 

Aristides says, " Let all that are without 
the knowledge of God, draw near there (^. ^., 
to ' their doctrine ' — ' the gateway of light ') 
and they will receive incorruptible words." 

John, the beloved, says, '' Let us love one 
another." 

Aristides says, "And they love one an- 
other." 

Further quotation would be wearisome, and, 
surely, is unnecessary. No one, unless under 
the influence of invincible prepossessions, could 
doubt that Aristides had read in what he refers 
to as " the gospel," "the Holy Gospel writing," 
as it is called among themselves, " their writ- 
ings," "their other writings," just what we 
read in our New Testament, These writings 
were not called the New Testament, as is well 
known, at first. But a writer against Montan- 
ism quoted by Eusebius (H. E. v. 17) speaks of 
them in a way which shows that they were re- 
garded as just as sacred as the most orthodox 
Christian considers them now. It seems clear, 



132 New Light on the Neiv Testament 

too, from his language that the book of The 
Kevelation concluded the body of writings then, 
just as it does now. Speaking of opposing the 
doctrines of Montanus by arguments, he ex- 
presses himself as '' apprehensive, lest, perhaps, 
I should appear to give any new injunctions, 
or to superadd anything to the doctrine of the 
New Testament, to which it is impossible that 
anything should be added or diminished by 
one who has resolved to live according to the 
gospel." " The gospel " and " their other 
writings" of Aristides must be the same body 
of writings called by this writer "the gospel " 
and " the New Testament," and the quotations 
given indicate that it was practically identical 
with the New Testament in our hands to-day. 

Common sense demands an answer to this 
question : — 

If these writings, evidently the same with 
our New Testament, were universally regarded 
by Christians in A. D. 125, as inspired and au- 
thoritative, and had been circulated all over 
the Roman world long before this and ac- 
cepted everjMvhere as the sacred records of 
Christianity, how did they attain this universal 
acceptance in this character ? 

The only rational answer is that they went 
forth under apostolic authority. These writ- 



Twin Lights from Athens 133 

ings, thus accepted by the great body of Chris- 
tians, many thousands of whom were younger 
contemporaries of the Apostle John, must have 
had apostolic authorship or authorization. 
Any other explanation of their universal 
acceptance is irrational and incredible. 

We have already found Justin Martyr imi- 
tating the illustrious example of his brother 
philosopher Aristides and presenting a more 
extended defense of the Christians to Anto- 
nine, the Pious, and his colleagues ; and in this 
and the other writings of Justin we find him 
speaking also of '' the gospel," giving it, or 
rather a part of it, another name, " The 
Memoirs of the Apostles P We have found 
that these contained what our four gospels do. 
Then w^e have seen standing by the side of 
Aristides at Athens in 125 a brave old man, 
presenting to Hadrian his defense of a some- 
what different kind. This man had labored 
for Christ for a long term of service. He is of 
'' the first immediate succession of the apos- 
tles," and had, not improbably, heard Paul 
preach, for he seems to have been a Eoman ; 
had the gift of prophecy, and is ranked with 
Agabus and the daughters of Philip ; had seen 
some of those w^hom our blessed Lord had 
healed and raised from the dead : and this 



134 New Light on the Neio Testament 

man had been one of those who had not only 
preached the gospel orally in many lands, but 
had distributed the written '' Gospel " or New 
Testament including these " Memoirs of the 
Apostles and those that followed them." For, 
we know him as the fellow-apologist of Aris- 
tides, who, as we have seen, had these writings 
which Justin quotes so freely. We surely will 
not be asked to believe that Quadratus spent 
his life in distributing, as the authentic records 
of Christianity, gospels which were unauthor- 
ized by the apostles whom he immediately 
succeeded and w^hose work he, in company 
with others, took up. On the other hand he 
could not be supposed to have had a diJfferent 
set of Christian writings from those with 
which his companion apologist shows himself 
so familiar, and which bear so many marks of 
identity with those we have in our hands to- 
day. 

In such witnesses as Justin, who sealed his 
testimony with his heart's blood, Aristides as 
courageous and faithful as his namesake who 
was surnamed ^' the Just," and Quadratus, 
who, true to his name, " stood four square to 
all the winds that blow," we have men whose 
evidence cannot lightly be brushed aside. As 
Professor Gildersleeve has said of the first, so 



Twin Lights from Athens 135 

we may say of all of them, " They were no 
holiday Christians." 

Aristides told Hadrian that if he would read 
this " gospel," he would "perceive the power 
that belongs to it." All Christians experience 
this power; the history of the world clearly 
shows it too, and we could not but believe it 
to be true and divine, even if we knew noth- 
ing of its history ; but it is a great gratifica- 
tion to be able to trace its utterances, by this 
and other lines, back to Christ and his apostles. 



YI. 



LIGHT FKOM THE LAND OF THE PHAEAOHS 



Egyptian darkness is a phrase with which 
we are all familiar ; but in our day, from the 
land of the Pharaohs, where once fell a curse 
of " darkness which may be felt," and over 
which for centuries has hung a pall of 
ignorance, degradation and misery, much light 
is springing up. Not only is this light burst- 
ing forth from its great temples, and tombs of 
kings, but even the sands which cover long 
ruined towns and villages, and humbler burial- 
places, are yielding their torches for the 
illumination of the word of God. Even the 
specimens of " potsherd literature " — ^the 
ostraka, or inscribed pottery tablets — now 
found in large numbers and in many lan- 
guages, and in many styles of writing, are 
adding their rays. Among them, some in 
Greek, are found to give remarkable confirma- 
tion to the accuracy of the New Testament. 

But very clear light has been coming of late 
years from another source in the land of 
Egypt to dissipate the mists which unbeliev- 

136 



Light from the Land of the Pharaohs 137 

ing criticism has endeavored to throw round 
the New Testament, and the gospels especially. 
The book, SujpernatuTal Religion^ which served 
to unsettle the faith of so many Englishmen, 
had a very distinct echo from the shores of 
America. A learner who sat for years at the 
feet of its author— not literally, by going to 
England and receiving oral instruction, but by 
poring over the bulky three volumes here — 
has, in his turn, produced a book ^ by which 
many ill-informed Americans have been con- 
firmed in infidelity. 

The main contention of this book is that 
our four gospels were not written till '4ate in 
the second century," and that they were 
substituted, by ecclesiastical authority, for the 
original gospels, which were written in the 
first century, but are now lost. lie tells his 
readers, '' Of the numerous gospels which 
Avere in circulation in the second century, not 
more than three can with any certainty, or 
with any high degree of probability, be traced 
back to the time of the apostles. These are 
The Gospel of Paid^ The Gospel^ or Reeollee- 
tions of Peter ^ and The Oracles^ or Sayings^ 
of Christy attributed to Matthew." 

^ ''The History of the Christian Keligion to the year 200," 
by C. B. Waite. 



138 New Light on the New Testament 

The last-named, he thinks, assumed the 
form of the "Gospel according to the Hebrews^^ 
in a later development. He also conjectures 
that the Gospel according to the Egyptians 
was a version of it. 

Now as to The Gospel of Paid^ I think 
there need be no discussion. "When Paul used 
the words, "according to my gospel," the 
connection shows that he meant the Gospel 
of Christ as preached by him, and not a 
gospel which he had written. This is too 
puerile to notice further. The author does 
not venture to assert that there is any trace of 
the existence, at any time, of such a writing 
in the form of even a single quotation from 
it ; though he ventures to guess that it was 
perpetuated, in its first stage of evolution, in 
The Gospel of Marcion. "It may be in- 
ferred," he tells us, " that it afterwards be- 
came incorporated in The Gospel of Marcion^ 
A. D., 145." 

The Oracles^ or sayings^ of Christ, if they 
existed,^ are " lost," indeed, as he sa3^s, but the 
Gospel according to the Hebrews^ which the 
author thinks is its secondary form, is not 
wholly lost. Twenty-three fragments are 

^ No trace of such a writing, distinct from the Gospel of 
Matthew, can be found. 



Light from the Land of the Pharaohs 139 

preserved, and these we have the right to ex- 
amine. What is the result ? In this heretical 
writing, the traces of our four gospels ai'e 
plainly visible,^ showing, of course, their 
previous existence. The Gospel according to 
the Hebrews was evidently a reconstruction 
of the four gospels, with certain additions and 
changes to furnish a support for the peculiar 
views of the Judaizing sect of the Ebionites. 
This sect seems to have had predecessors in 
some churches even before the death of the 
Apostle John, and may be referred to by him 
in the Apocalypse as those " who say they are 
Jews, and are not, but do lie," and whom he 
describes as " of the synagogue of Satan." 
Their heretical gospel, with which they tried 
to supplant the four gospels, may have been 
written very early in the second century ; and 
if so, as even the few fragments which remain 
show that our gospels were all drawn upon, 
the fact that these gospels were written before 
the close of the first century is an almost 
necessar}^ inference ; for such use of them in- 
dicates that they were not only already 
written, but that they were the accepted and 
authorized foundations of Christian belief, and 

^See Dr. B. Weiss' Introduction to N. T., Vol. II, 
i 45, 5. 



140 New Light on the New Testament 

no one can imagine that they could be ex- 
tensively copied, distributed, and accepted as 
authoritative in a moment. 

While the w^riter of this new view of the 
early history of the Christian religion thinks 
that our Gospel of Luke was a late second 
century evolution from his imaginary Gospel 
of Paul^ and Matthew another, from the 
Gospel according to the Hebrexos^ he makes, 
the, for him, very unfortunate guess that the 
Gospel of Mark is a second century edition of 
the Gospel of Peter^ which he has classed 
among the original first century gospels. 

Unfortunately for this hypothesis, a consid- 
erable part of the Gospel according to Peter 
has been discovered ; and a translation of the 
fragment by the distinguished scholar. Canon 
J. Armitage Robinson, editor of Cambridge 
Texts and Studies, lies before me. It was dis- 
covered by the French Archaeological Mis- 
sion, Cairo, in 1886 at Akhmim^ (Panopolis) 
in Upper Egypt, in a grave, supposed to be 
that of a monk. It is a parchment manu- 
script, and is thus described : — 

"The Akhmim manuscript, six by four and 
three-fourth inches in size, is written in uncial 
characters, in a sloping hand current in manu- 
1 Written, also, Akhmin. 



Light from the Land of the Pharaohs 141 

scripts of the seventh to the ninth century, and 
contains on thirty-three vellum leaves (sixty- 
six pages) the Gosjpel according to Peter ^ and 
the Apocaly]?se of Enoch,'^^ 

The author of this so-called History of the 
Christian Religion to the Year WO holds 
that these three Gospels — of Paul, of Peter, 
and according to the Hebrews — were " sup- 
pressed " by the strong hand of ecclesiastical 
authority, and that our four gospels — of later 
origin, in his opinion — were " substituted " for 
them. As an actual instance of such suppres- 
sion and substitution, he quotes from Eusebius' 
Ecclesiastical History, Book V^I, Ch. 12, where 
is preserved part of a letter of Serapion, 
bishop of Antioch, written in A. D. 190, to the 
Church of Rhossus in Cilicia, which was under 
his care. It seems that some of the people 
there were taken with the Gospel of Peter, of 
which their bishop seems to have known noth- 
ing before this. As soon as Serapion became 
aware of the character of this so-called " Gos- 
pel," he condemned it as unfit to be used, 
because it had evidently been forged in the 
interest of the Docetae,^ a heretical sect to 



^ That is Seemers — people who taught that Christ had not 
really become a man, but only seemed to do so, assuming, 
not a real, but a phantasmal human body. 



142 New Light on the Neiu - Testament 

which the Apostle John seems clearly to refer 
when he speaks of some who denied that 
"Jesus Christ had come in the flesh." 

This author tells us : — 

'' In the year 190, a large number of these 
Gospels of Peter were found in use by the 
Church of Rhossus in Cilicia; and so much 
were the Christians of that church attached 
to them that it became necessary for Serapion 
to suppress them and substitute the canonical 
gospels in their stead." 

Now let us lay this statement and the facts 
of the case as stated in Eusebius side by side, 
and see how they agree. Here is a part of 
Serapion's letter : — 

" We, brethren, receive Peter and the other 
apostles even as Christ ; but the writings that 
go falsely by their name we reject, as we are 
well acquainted with them, and know also that 
we have not received such handed down to 
us." ... He tells them that he became 
acquainted with the character of this so-called 
gospel by borrowing it from some " whom we 
called Docetae, for most of its views are those 
of this sect." 

The author of this remarkable " history " is 
said to be a judge ; but for a judge, he deals 
strangely with the evidence before him. 



Light from the Land of the Fharaohs 143 

Where does he learn that the four gospels 
were "substituted" for this Gospel of Peter 
when it was suppressed ? Neither Eusebius 
nor Serapion tells of any such substitution; 
and all, except those prepossessed with the 
author's theory, would understand that Sera- 
pion forbade the use of this Gospel of Peter — 
which he calls a forgeiy — along with the '' re- 
ceived" gospels, which they evidently used 
already, as nothing is said about substituting 
them in the place of the forbidden one which 
went falsely under the name of Peter. 

Sometimes, in looking up from my writing, 
I see, on a ridge a half-mile or so away, an 
electric car rapidly crossing the field of vision, 
and at certain points, behaving in a strange 
way. Sometimes it will be suddenly elon- 
gated, and then, as quickly shortened. Again 
its whole shape wall change, and then it will 
suddenly rear up as if to jump a hurdle, and 
then as quickly plunge downward as if about 
to bury itself in the earth. Is the car actually 
thus eccentric and frolicsome ? Of course I 
know that it is not, for I have often ridden on 
it over that very place and know^ that the rails 
are straight and smooth, and that the cars be- 
have themselves decently. I know that the 
pranks of which this one seems to be guilty 



144: New Light on the Neio Testament 

are only apparent : in short that the whole 
series of strange antics is the result of in- 
equalities, in the glass of the window through 
which I look. It is all due to the waves and 
bubbles in the glass ; their effect being magni- 
fied by the distance. The medium through 
which we view a thing has much to do with 
the notion we get of it. Our judge has looked 
at this testimony through the medium of his 
suppression — and — substitution theory. 

The question as to which were the original 
writings in this case is no longer a subject for 
guessing. The discovery of the fragment of 
the Gospel according to Peter makes this 
plain. We have the testimony of such a 
scholar as Dr. Sanday of Oxford University, 
for instance, to this effect : — 

" The apocryphal Gospel of Peter is based 
upon our gospels " (see his Bampton Lectures, 
especially p. 301, note). He gives a number 
of instances in which terms peculiar to the 
four gospels are used in this Gospel according 
to Peter J besides other evidences of its depend- 
ence on them ; and, referring to the heretical 
changes and additions in this so-called gospel, 
says of the author of it : '^ It is very plain 
where he begins to walk by himself." Eef er- 
ring to these eccentric features of the forgery 



Light from the Land of the Pharaohs 145 

he says : " In all these ways the contrast 
between the apocryphal gospel and the canon- 
ical gospels is marked. The latter are really 
' a garden inclosed.' Intrusive elements seem 
to be carefully kept out of them. They pre- 
serve the type of language, as it can be abun- 
dantly shown, that they also preserve the type 
of idea, which was appropriate just to the 
three years of our Lord's public ministry, and 
no more." 

Other testimonies might be given, but they 
can hardly be necessary. The writer of the 
introduction of the Gospel accoTding to Peter 
in the Ante-Nicene Fathers (volume IX), 
though evidently not a conservative, does not 
ev€«i raise the question as to the originality of 
our gospels. His only question is as to 
whether the forged writing does not draw its 
materials from other sources besides our gos- 
pels. He concludes that, " whether the author 
used any other sources than the canonical gos- 
pels is a matter still in doubt." 

But the Gospel according to Peter itself^ 
if space could be allowed to introduce it, 
would furnish the most convincing proof the 
intelligent reader could ask that it drew 
its materials from all four of the canonical 
gospels. 



146 New Light on the New Testament 

Now we all know that materials must exist 
before the manufactured article — the wool be- 
fore the cloth, the cloth before the coat. 

When we apply the facts, as they now stand 
in the clear light of discovery, to the theory 
of our author, something takes place very 
much like the vanishing into airy nothingness 
of a brilliant, big bubble when pricked with a 
pin. 

So enamored is the author of this "his- 
tory " with his theory of suppression — and— 
substitution that he leaves his period of the 
first two centuries, and like a heedless boy, 
chases his bubble down through the centuries 
to the fifth, where while he imagines it most 
beautiful, it suddenly bursts as he is admiring 
its iridescent glories. He tells us (p. vii. 
Fifth Ed.) :— 

" The fact is, there are various instances 
of the displacement of older gospels and the 
substitution of the canonical in their stead. 
Even as late as the fifth century Theodoret 
found it necessary to suppress the Gospel of 
Tatian and substitute in its place the four 
gospels." 

He then quotes Theodoret, as we have 
already done. " I found, myself," says Theod- 
oret, (a. d. 430) ''upwards of two hundred 



Light from the Land of the Pharaohs 147 

such books held in honor among your 
churches, and collecting them all together, I 
laid them aside, and instead, introduced the 
gospels of the four evangelists." On page 326, 
fifth edition, the author expresses the opinion 
that " The fact that Theodoret felt obliged to 
suppress it is inconsistent with the theory 
that it is a harmony of the four gospels." 

We all know the truth now. It is d^ har- 
mony of the four gospels, and could not have 
been older than they, just as the cloth cannot 
be older than the wool of which it is woven, 
or the coat than the cloth of which it is made. 
The four gospels were the materials out of 
which the Diatessaron of Tatian {i, e,^ as the 
word means, the '' through four " — four gospels, 
or four evangelists) was made. 

The discovery of the Diatessaron of Tatian 
was to the main contention of the Tubingen 
School like the stone from David's sling to the 
forehead of Goliath. Honest scholars, for- 
merly of that school, acknowledge that discov- 
eries have now demonstrated the falsity of the 
opinion of Baur and his followers that the 
gospels were not written till the second cen- 
tury. We have already seen the conclusions 
of that brilliant leader, Prof. Adolf ITarnack of 
Berlin ; and no honest man who knows the 



148 New Light on the New Testament 

facts will try to stand by tbo contention of 
this author that our gospels were written 
"late in the second century." There may be 
exceptions in the case of those who though, 
like him, not conscious of intentional dis- 
honesty, yet have their vision so w^arped by 
theories that they are incapable of seeing facts 
as they are. In his edition of 1900, published 
several years after the discoveries, mentioned 
in this little book, were made, he fails to men- 
tion them. 

But we should not judge him too harshly. 
He is human, and it could not have been an 
agreeable task to record facts so destructive of 
his theory. Then, too, they would undeceive 
so may of his readers. Ignorance is the 
mother of infidelity, as well as of superstitious 
devotion. 

In the preface to the third edition of this 
w^ork, republished in the fifth edition, on page 
seven the author says : — 

" In conclusion, we again call attention to 
the fact that none of the main propositions of 
this work have been in the slightest degree 
impeached ; much less, overthrown." 

It is to be hoped that the author will not 
repeat this in future editions. Should he do 
so, after being informed of the facts which 



Light from the Land of the Fharoahs 149 

have been mentioned, his professions of candor 
will fall under something more than sus- 
picion. ^ 

The Gospel according to Peter and the Gospel 
according to the Hebrews^ not only show that 
our four gospels were already in existence 
when they were written, and thus are valu- 
able witnesses for them, but they tend to con- 
firm them in another w^ay. The character of 
these productions stands in marked contrast to 
that of the four gospels. As soon as they 
leave the support of our gospels and begin 
" to walk by themselves," we see with what 
tottering and wayward footsteps they pro- 
ceed. When we read the account of the 
resurrection of Christ in the Gospel according 
to Peter^ we find it declaring of those who 
were guarding the tomb, *' Again they see 
three men come forth from the tomb, and 



* It may be thought that too much has been said about the 
two books, Supernatural Religion^ and The History of the Chris- 
tian Religion to the Year Two Hundred, but as these are the 
two chief efforts of infidelity in our times, the one in England 
and the other in America ; and as the light of discovery has 
so strikingly revealed their falsity, the course pursued has 
seemed to me to be the true one. Besides this, mere refer- 
ences to infidelity in general can hardly be so satisfactory to 
any truth seeker as the presentation of particular facts 
which furnish a refutation of particular claims of infidelity. 
The concrete is more impressive than the abstract — the par- 
ticular than the general. 



150 New Light on the New Testament 

three of them supporting one, and a cross 
following them : and of the two the head 
reached unto the heaven, but the head of him 
that was led by them overpassed the heavens. 
And they heard a voice from the heavens, say- 
ing, ' Thou hast preached unto them that sleep.' 
And a response was heard from the cross, 
^ Yea ! ' " We look at the fragments of the 
Gospel acGording to the Hebrews^ and find one 
of them representing our Saviour as speaking 
of the Holy Spirit as his 'Mother,' and as 
taking him by one hair of his head and trans- 
porting him to a distant mountain. We find 
ourselves, here, in a different region from that 
of the gospels. We observe a tone altogether 
different from theirs, and recognize in the 
strange atmosphere, mephitic odors of some- 
thing so akin to blasphemy and sacrilege, that 
we feel the disposition to rush away to escape 
asphyxia. 

As a recent writer ^ has well said : — 
^' The simplicity, directness and conciseness 
of the four is gone ; their doctrinal purity is 
departed ; we are now in the realm of hag- 
gada." 

Canon Armitage Robinson, the translator, 

^ Rev. R. B. Woodwoith in Presbyterian Quarterly for 
January, 1895. 



Light from the Land of the Pharaohs 151 

(as quoted by the same author) says of the 
results of the examination of the Gospel acGord- 
ing to Peter : — 

" The facts are just as they should be if the 
church's universal tradition as to the supreme 
and unique position of the four canonical 
gospels is still to be sustained by historical 
criticism. The words of Irenaaus (a. d. 200.) 
are as true as ever to-day, and they have re- 
ceived a new and notable confirmation by our 
latest recovery : ' So strong is the position of 
our gospels that the heretics themselves bear 
witness to them, and each must start from them 
to prove his own doctrine.' " 

We have already seen that, when Ciasca 
showed the Apostolic Visitor of the Catholic 
Copts the manuscript of the Diatessaron in 
the Yatican library, this ecclesiastic told him 
of another in Egypt in the possession of 
Ghalim Dos Ghali, the Copt, '' the Catholic " ; 
and that it was presented to the Apostolic See 
and deposited in the Borgian library. This 
manuscript, being complete, supplied what 
was missing in the other, and having a bet- 
ter text, was useful in correcting it. Thus 
Egypt contributed additional brightness to 
the rays of the " great light from the 
Vatican." 



152 New Light on the New Testament 

But, besides those already named, there are 
other lights from the land of the Pharaohs. 

In July^ 1897, two young Oxford scholars, 
Messrs. Grenfel and Hunt, were engaged in 
explorations on the edge of the Lybian desert, 
some 130 miles south of Cairo, on the site of 
the old city of Oxyrrhynchus, once a place 
of considerable size, as its ruins show, and an 
important Christian center in the early cen- 
turies of our era. They made many literary 
discoveries among the rubbish heaps of the 
old city, and one of these has been the subject 
of much comment and speculation among 
Christian scholars. It was a leaf from a 
papyrus book containing Logia, or sayings, of 
our Lord. In it we discover, at once, an echo 
of the sayings of our Lord in the gospels; and 
one of them is identical with a saying recorded 
in Luke. Experts say that " the papyrus was 
probably written not later than the year 200." 
While one sentence corresponds with one in 
Luke, others, in words used, or in the senti- 
ments expressed, suggest both Matthew's and 
John's Gospels as sources. But along with 
w^hat is familiar, there is much that is novel 
and not a little obscure m these " sayings." 
Reading them and trying, with all one's might, 
to understand some of them, makes one thank- 



Light from the Land of the Pharaohs 153 

ful that our gospels recorded our Saviour's 
"sayings" before they were twisted, uninten- 
tionally, or intentionally, for the support of 
some theory, into forms which are false, as we 
see in the apocryphal gospels of heretical sects, 
or were shrouded with Delphic obscurity, as 
we find them in some of the Oxyrrhynchus 
Logia. 

Near this Logia fragment, there were dis- 
covered remains of Homer's Iliad and 
Odyssey^ of Thucydides and other classical 
writers ; but, what is of most interest to us, 
papyrus leaves containing seven verses of the 
Epistle to the Romans, two pages of the 
Gospel of John, and a leaf of the Gospel of 
Matthew were found. The fragment of the 
Gospel according to John is thus spoken of by 
the Secretary of the Egyptian Exploration 
Fund, Dr. W. C. Winslow :— 

" The fragment of St. John's Gospel forms 
an important portion, small though it be, of a 
book of about fifty pages containing that 
gospel, dating about 200. We have St. John 
1 : 23-41, except that verse thirty-two is want- 
ing : also St. John 20 : 11-25, except that 
verse eighteen is missing." After further 
describing it, he says, " The papyrus belongs 
to the same class with the Vatican and Sinaitic 



154 New Light on the New Testament 

Codices," and that it ^' is a remarkable corrob- 
oration of those texts and of our accepted 
version." 

The fragment of Eomans is in large un- 
cial characters rather rudely made, and is 
thought to be a schoolboy's exercise; and if 
this be true it is an additional indication of 
the extensive use of the New Testament at its 
date of A. D. 316. 

But the most interesting of these finds at 
Oxyrrhynchus is a papyrus leaf containing a 
part of the first chapter of Matthew. 

Dr. Winslow says : — 

'* Its date is fixed by some experts at A. D. 
150, and by the editors of the society's publi- 
cations at fifty or sixty years later." 

The Greek text seems to be almost abso- 
lutely identical with that of Westcott and 
Hort on which our Revised Version is founded. 
Prof .JRendel Harris, by a very close examination, 
thinks he has discovered an apostrophe which 
this revised Greek text does not show ; but 
one is tempted to ask whether this little mark 
might not have been due to some minute speck 
on the papyrus. The identity is about as 
nearly absolute as would be possible in copy- 
ing one page of Greek from another. Indeed 
a copyist would have to make a good many 



Light from the Land of the Pharaohs 155 

trials before he could reproduce a page of 
Greek as perfectly. This is very remarkable. 
Here are two Greek texts, between the writ- 
ing of which probably seventeen centuries 
have rolled away, and yet they are practically 
identical. This tends to confirm what was 
said by Dr. Hort long before this discovery : — 

'' If comparative trivialities, such as changes 
of order, the omission or insertion of an article 
with proper names, and the like, are set aside, 
the words " (in the Greek Testament) " in our 
opinion still subject to doubt can hardly 
amount to a thousandth part of the whole 
New Testament." 

In transcribing the vast number of copies 
which we now have, a great multitude of mis- 
takes was unavoidable ; but the great number 
of copies enables us to see what the mistakes 
were in any one copy. This has brought it 
about that the text of the New Testament is 
now in a state of certainty which far surpasses 
that of the Greek or Latin classics that have 
come down to us.-^ This leaf of Matthew, 
probably the oldest scrap of writing contain- 
ing a page of the Greek New Testament is a 
bright light from the land of the Pharaohs, 
showing the fixedness of the text and its pres- 
^ See Appendix. 



156 Neio Light on the New Testament 

ervation in purity to our own times, in spite 
of the inevitable mistakes of copyists, and the 
efforts of heretics to corrupt it. To all theories 
of the gradual evolution of the New Testa- 
ment from mere germs to its present form, it 
gives a death-blow, a veritable coup de grace. 



VII. 



MANY LIGHTS FROM MANY LANDS, OR LIGHT 
OJSr THE SETTING 

Some years ago there was found on the 
Acropolis at Athens, built into a long-buried 
wall, a slab of marble on which appeared, in 
relief, a female head. The archaeologist in 
charge of excavations which were in progress, 
M. Kavvadias, pronounced it a fragment of 
the frieze of Phidias on the Parthenon near at 
hand. Other archsDologists thought this im- 
probable. After much discussion, an artist 
recollected that, among the specimens of the 
Parthenon frieze among the Elgin marbles in 
the British Museum, there was a group in 
which appeared a female figure — that of 
Iris, the goddess of the rainbow — without a 
head. A cast was taken from the broken slab 
discovered on the Acropolis, and sent to Eng- 
land. Parts of the slab had been broken away, 
possibly by a mason's hammer in fitting it into 
the wall, so that, in those parts, it did not fit 
the missing place in the frieze ; but it was 

157 



158 New Light on the New Testament 

necessary only to put the fragment into the 
vacant place to see that it belonged there. 
Protuberances and corresponding depressions 
in the marble just fitted, and a lifted arm and 
hand on the frieze met with long-lost fingers 
holding the twist of hair at the back of the 
head — the head of Iris, the rainbow goddess. 

The sight of such a correspondence flashes 
conviction more quickly than reasoning, and 
leads to a conclusion more reliable than the 
most labored arguments of the most distin- 
guished experts. 

Something like this has occurred in the case 
of the New Testament. 

When we find, in any writing, incidental 
references to passing events, to political condi- 
tions, to methods of governmental administra- 
tion, to names of official positions and of per- 
sons occupying them, to geographical features 
and names of places, to peculiar customs 
among the people described, we have an indi- 
cation that the writer had personal knowledge 
of these particulars which only one living in 
the period of these occurrences would be likely 
to have. If he implies that he lives in the 
time of which he writes, and if the most 
searching investigations show more and more 
plainly, as they are pursued, that his represen- 



Many Lights from Many Lands 159 

tations of all these particulars are correct, we 
never doubt that the accounts are given by a 
contemporary writer, unless thoroughly con- 
vincing evidence is adduced to prove that he 
has made a false claim. 

If several writings, very different from each 
other in their style of composition and general 
character, which have always been attributed 
to different writers, speak from various points 
of view of the same general subject, and all 
have, in various degrees, these incidental ref- 
erences in them, then, it must be admitted 
that the improbability that the accounts origi- 
nated at a later period is greatly increased. 
Such a conspiracy for deception, without any 
imaginable motive, would be well-nigh incred- 
ible ; and the amount of research to be under- 
taken by each individual to avoid mistakes 
would present a task before which even the 
archaeological expert would quail. 

With our habits of travel and means of rapid 
transit, with our newspapers, magazines, re- 
views, and archaeological publications, we can 
hardly estimate the difficulty of such an un- 
dertaking on the part of any writers of the 
second century to reproduce all the par- 
ticulars of the situation of the first, as they 
are incidentally, naturally, and without 



160 New Light on the New Testament 

effort presented in the writings of the New 
Testament. 

Now, if we had been at the British Museum 
when the plaster cast of the head of Iris was 
brought from Athens, and had merely seen 
that, when put in the place of the frieze where 
a head was missing, the size of the head w^as 
as it should be, and that the pose of the statue 
w^as correct, that the outline of the fragment 
fitted the outline of the vacant space on the 
frieze, and especially, if we saw that the fin- 
gers on the head grasping the lock of hair just 
met an arm and hand that fitted them, on the 
frieze, we would ask no further proof that this 
fragment was the long lost head of Iris. 
There might be a thousand lines and angles to 
correspond with a thousand lines and angles 
in the broken surface on the frieze, yet we 
would not wait to have each one of these cal- 
culated by mathematical processes. The fitting 
as we saw it would be as thoroughly convinc- 
ing as volumes of mathematical calculations. 

Volumes might be, and have been, written 
on the correspondences of the New Testament 
and its setting ; but the presentation of a very 
few of the multitude of particulars will be 
sufficiently convincing. 

These correspondences, however, are so 



Many Lights from Many Lands 161 

numerous that we experience an embarras 
des richesses. It is hard to select from them ; 
but we may as well begin at the beginning. 
In connection with the account of the birth of 
our blessed Lord, Luke tells us that in obedi- 
ence to a decree of Augustus Caesar command- 
ing a universal "enrollment" in the Eoman 
Empire, Joseph and Mary, being descendants 
of King David, went to their "own city," 
Bethlehem, to be enrolled, and that this en- 
rollment took place while Cyrenius (Latin, 
Quirinus) was governor of Syria. Two objec- 
tions have been raised to the truthfulness of 
this statement. One is the assertion that 
Cyrenius did not become governor of Syria 
till several years after our Saviour's birth. 
But the meaning may be that the decree, 
though issued earlier, only became completely 
effective {iyevero) in all parts of the province 
during the governorship of Cyrenius. But 
another more probable explanation is in the 
fact that " there has been no serious refutation 
of the view first developed by Zumpt that 
Quirinus was twice governor of Syria." ^ 

The second objection was that there was no 
record of such an enrollment earlier than the 

^ Maclear's Historical lUustrations of the New Testament 
Scriptures. 



162 New Light on the New Testament 

reign of the Emperor JNTero. But recent dis- 
coveries by Messrs. Grenfel and Hunt at Oxyr- 
rhynchusin Egypt have thrown new light on 
this subject. '' The important matter is that 
we are now for the first time put in possession 
of contemporary confirmation of Luke's state- 
ment that ' there went out a decree from 
Cassar Augustus, that all the world should be 
enrolled.' . . . 

" The one point that may now be considered 
as settled by Messrs. Grenfel and Hunt's dis- 
covery is that the first census ordered by 
Augustus certainly occurred in the time of 
Herod" {BiUia, December, 1899). 

So the objection is turned into a confirma- 
tion. We now see the birth of our blessed 
Lord linked not only with the administration 
of the great world-ruler and of his representa- 
tive in the province of Syria, but with a 
definite and far-reaching act of that adminis- 
tration which was repeated at regular intervals 
by his successors. The decree of Augustus is 
now plainly seen to be not an invention of 
Luke but a fact of history. 

The fact stated by Luke (2 : 3) that in Judasa 
each person went to his " own city " to be en- 
rolled, also throws a sidelight on the peculiarity 
of the application of Eoman government to 



Many Lights from Alany Lands 163 

Jewish customs which must appeal to ail who 
are informed and are capable of thinking. It 
is most suggestive of the peculiar customs of 
the Jews and of the wise rule of Rome to 
avoid all unnecessary antagonism with exist- 
ing customs and institutions among nations 
under her control. 

The return from Egypt furnishes another 
view, in Matthew's description of it, of the 
political status of Jud^a soon after the death of 
Herod the Great. Why was Joseph ^' afraid " 
to return to Judaea when he heard that Arche- 
laus reigned in the room of his father Herod ? 

The fact that this young monster turned 
loose his soldiery on the people and slew three 
thousand of them, soon after he assumed con- 
trol, in the precincts of the temple itself, sug- 
gests a reason. Why did he consider Nazareth 
in Galilee a safer place of abode ? The fact 
that Herod Antipas ruled there and that the 
power of Archelaus was confined to Judsea 
explains this. 

These facts connected with the birth and 
infancy of our Lord as stated by these two 
evangelists are but samples of a vast number 
of incidental references which show the per- 
fect familiarity of the writers of the jSTew 
Testament with the political status in the 



164 New Light on the New Testament 

Holy Land during these times. Tiie political 
conditions of the period covered by the New 
Testament narrative were such that no writer 
could have forged the accounts at a later time 
without falling into many mistakes. The gov- 
ernment of the country was administered in 
five distinct forms during this period. Even 
the astute, careful and clear-headed Tacitus, 
writing near the end of the first century, 
and doubtless with access to public records, 
seems to have been unable, successfully to 
thread the mazes of a situation so . compli- 
cated ; and the most skillful forger who, in the 
second century, should have attempted the 
telling of such a story as that of the gospels 
and The Acts would have tripped at every 
step. How is it with the New Testament 
writers? Here is the answer of one who has 
examined the facts very carefully : — 

" The writers of the New Testament nowhere 
betray any perplexity. They mark quite inci- 
dentally, and without the slightest trace of 
strain or effort, the various phases, extraordi- 
nary as they were, of the civil government of 
Palestine. Thus, at the era of the advent Ave 
find (1) the whole country subject to the sole 
rule of Herod the Great (Matt. 2:1; Luke 
1:5); then (2) we have his dominions parti- 



3Iany Lights from Many Lands 165 

tioned out among his sous, while one, Archelaus, 
rules over Judaea with the title of king (Matt. 
2 : 22) ; then (3) we see Judasa reduced to the 
condition of a Roman province, while Galilee, 
Ituraea and Trachonitis continue under native 
princes (Luke 3:1); then (4) in the person of 
Herod Agrippa I, we have the old kingdom 
of Palestine restored (Acts 12:1); and finally 
(5) we observe the whole country, reduced un- 
der Eoman rule and Roman procurators (Felix, 
Acts 23 : 24 ; Festus, Acts 24 : 27), while a cer- 
tain degree of deference is paid to Herod 
Agrippa II, to whom Festus refers Paul's case 
as presenting special difficulties." ^ 

But this is only the vestibule. I will not at- 
tempt to exhibit in detail the many complica- 
tions which would have furnished snares and 
pitfalls for any forger who might have at- 
tempted, in the second century, to write such 
accounts. The writer just quoted has summed 
up the difiiculties which such an attempt would 
have encountered under five heads : — 

1. The political condition of Palestine — just 
mentioned. 

2. Roman emperors and administrators. 

3. Jewish kings and princes. 

4. Condition of the Jewish nation. 

^ Maclear's Historical Illustrations. 



166 Neiv Light on the New Testamerd 

5. The Greek and Roman world. 

Under each of these heads, as every reader 
must know, there is an intricate array of par- 
ticulars. This makes it plain, not only that 
the task of the forger of the second century 
would have been an impossible one, but that 
the subject is too large to pursue further in 
this direction. 

The Holv Land itself is a witness to the 
truth of the narratives in the gospels so far as 
testimony of such a character can be confirm- 
atory. The land as it now lies, after all the 
changes of centuries effected by Eomans, Sara- 
cens, Crusaders, the deadening hand of the 
Turk, and the great forces of nature operating 
on its unprotected surface for almost two mil- 
lenniums, is still so striking as the scene and 
setting of the wonderful story that it has been 
called the Fifth Gospel. Modern surveys, ex- 
plorations and excavations are continually 
adding to our knowledge of the almost in- 
numerable correspondences between the Land 
and the Book. Just before writing this there 
has come under my eye the announcement of 
the identification of Bethabara where John the 
Baptist baptized on the Jordan, at the south- 
ern end of the Lake of Galilee — a discovery 
which clears up difficulties in the narrative 



Many Lights from Many Lands 167 

created by the location of the traditional site ; 
and new discoveries, tested by the application 
of scientific principles, and freed from the de- 
lusions of legend, are continually contributing 
to our knowledge of '' those holy fields " (as 
said the dying king centuries ago), 

*' Over whose acres walked those blessed feet 
Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nailed 
For our advantage, on the bitter cross." 

The journeys and experiences of the Apostle 
Paul, as related in The Acts and referred to in 
his Epistles, find a no less striking confirma- 
tion in the setting of each incident as seen in 
the light of modern discovery. 

Wood's discoveries at Ephesus^ have thrown 
a flood of light on the account of Paul's ex- 
periences there as given in the nineteenth 
chapter of The Acts. 

From the accounts of Ephesus given by his- 
torians, especially by Pliny and Strabo, and 
from coins and inscriptions and the revelations 
of exploration, it is now easy to see why the 
temple of Diana (Artemis) of the Ephesians 
was reckoned one of the seven wonders of the 
world, and why anything which seemed to 

* Discoveries at Ephesus^ by J. T. Wood, F. S. A., Lon- 
don, 1877. 



168 New Light on the New Testament 

threaten interests connected with the worship 
conducted in this marvel of architecture, which 
was, at once, the chief shrine and treasury of 
western Asia, might naturally arouse such a 
tumult as that which Luke describes, and lead 
to the gathering of the great assemblage in 
that vast theater whose remains indicate that 
twenty thousand people could be seated there. 
The mention of the ^' silver shrines of Diana," 
the "no small gain" of the "craftsmen" en- 
gaged in this manufacture, " the temple of the 
great goddess Diana," and "her magnificence," 
the indication of the wide extent of the cult — 
" whom all Asia and the world worshipeth " 
— the rushing " with one accord into the the- 
ater," the expressions, "town clerk" (gram- 
raateus), " the city of the Ephesians is the wor- 
shiper (neokoros — temple-sweeper) of the great 
Goddess Diana," "the image which fell down 
from Jupiter," deputies (anthupatoi), "lawful 
assembly " (ecclesia), all occurring in the space 
of twelve verses, present to us unique features 
of an occurrence of which Ephesus, as history 
and archaeology combine in showing it to have 
been, was the scene, and the only possible 
scene in all the world. No jewel ever fitted 
its setting more perfectly. 

When we go back and see Paul in Macedonia 



Many Lights from Many Lands 169 

we find similar correspondences between the 
narrative of Luke and the environment in each 
place as history and recent discovery present it. 

For instance, Philippi is said to be (Acts 
16 : 12) " the chief city of that part of Mace- 
donia, and a colony." The word translated 
" part " is a peculiar one as here used, and the 
following throws new light on it : — 

" In Chapter XVI, which contains an ac- 
count of Paul's visit to Philippi in Macedonia, 
a word is used (Meris) to designate the ' dis- 
trict ' in Macedonia in which it was situated, 
which occurs nowhere else in that significa- 
tion, so that its genuineness has been justly 
suspected. But among the Fayum documents 
a considerable number make use of just the 
same word to describe divisions in that 
region." The account shows us, too, all the 
accompaniments of a " colony " — that peculiar 
institution of the Roman Empire, entirely dif- 
ferent from a colony in the modern sense — by 
which cities in different provinces of the em- 
pire, for some special service, were honored 
with the title, privileges and form of govern- 
ment which made them Romes in miniature. 

At Thessalonica we find companions of 
Paul brought before '' the rulers of the city " 
(Gr. Politarchai). This peculiar name is said 



170 Neiv Light on the New Testament 

not to occur in any other place in Greek lit- 
erature. Yet an arch only recently demol- 
ished in Thessalonica (now Salonika) bore an 
inscription which stated that it was erected 
when certain persons, whose names are given, 
were ''politarchs of the city." 

We may not tarry with Paul at Athens to 
study the vivid portrayal of the scene in 
which he stands among the Stoics and Epicure- 
ans to preach the gospel of Christ, but we can 
obtain an instructive glimpse through the 
very intelligent eyes of another. Prof. Ernst 
Curtius of the University of Berlin, the great 
Greek scholar and historian, said in the " Ke- 
ports of the Eoyal Academy of Sciences " in 
1893 ; under the title Paulus in Athens: — 

"Whoever approaches the report as given 
in The Acts without pre-judgments and in 
fairness, cannot, in my conviction, do other- 
wise than accept the account as that of a well- 
informed and truthful witness." After giving 
his grounds for this belief, he says : — 

" I can only conclude as I began, that it is 
my firm conviction that whoever denies the 
historical character of the report of Paul in 
Athens tears out of the history of mankind 
one of its most important pages." 

When we retrace our steps again, and find 



Many Lights from Many Lands 171 

Paul in Paphos on the island of Cyprus, we 
are on the scene of another triumph of the 
truth. Luke gives the governor, Sergius 
Paulus, the title anthupatos (translated 
" deputy " in King James' version), and the 
accusation of inaccuracy was made against his 
account; but besides the statement of Dio 
Cassius showing that he was correct, a coin of 
Cyprus and an extended inscription, both of 
the reign of Claudius, have been discovered, 
containing the names of persons who were 
proconsuls, and with this title, anthupatos, on 
them, thus fully vindicating Luke's accuracy. 

These are but samples of almost innumer- 
able correspondences that might be mentioned, 
but it is hoped that they are sufficient. 

There were parts broken away from the 
outer edges of the fragment of marble bear- 
ing the bas-relief of a female head and fingers 
of a hand, and a very hardy objector might 
say that we do not know that, if preserved, 
they would have fitted into the still vacant 
spaces on the frieze. Ordinary mortals, how- 
ever, would feel perfectly sure, from the per- 
fect fitting of that which was found, that these 
little fragments, if found, would fit into their 
places, too. Just so the general and perfect 
fitting of the New Testament into its environ- 



172 New Light on the New Testament 

ment, so far as it has been determined by the 
strictest scientific methods — a fitting becom- 
ing more, evident with each new discovery — 
goes to confirm the conclusion that, could that 
environment be perfectly known, the corre- 
spondence would be perfect. The fitting of 
the head of Iris to her body on the Pentelic 
marble of the frieze is hardly more convincing 
of the fact that it belongs there than are the 
facts at which we have been looking, that the 
New Testament belongs to its traditional set- 
ting, the apostolic age. 

We have seen many lights falling on the 
New Testament, all combining to make clear 
the fact that it was not written in the second 
century, from uncertain traditions, but in the 
first, by men who were thoroughly informed 
about the great facts of the redemption 
through Christ. We have more accurate and 
detailed contemporary testimony, hj thor- 
oughly competent witnesses, about Christ 
than about any other historical character of 
ancient times. It would be more rational to 
doubt that Julius Csesar laid the foundation of 
the Eoman Empire than that Christ founded 
that greater empire, the Kingdom of Heaven. 
With the progress of discovery, light after 
light has risen to shine on the New Testa- 



Many Lights from Many Lands 173 

ment, each adding to the evidence of the re- 
liableness of its record ; but the clearest light 
of all is not that which shines upon it, but 
that which shines from it — the portraiture of 
him who is the light of the world. 

He is no shadowy being encompassed with a 
mist of legend, but a clearly drawn historical 
character, yet entirely unique, rising infinitely 
beyond any other the world has ever seen ; 
who, though he lived a public life of only 
about three years, and never led an army or 
wrote a book, has, yet, influenced the human 
race as no other man or set of men can be 
claimed to have done. With Jean Paul Eich- 
ter, we see in him that One, " who, being the 
holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among 
the holy, lifted, with his pierced hand, empires 
off their hinges and turned the stream of the 
centuries out of its channel, and still governs 
the ages." 

These grand words impress us with the 
greatness of a Being, who, though a man, has 
no equal. The mightiest, the holiest, because 
he is God as well as man. But without 
divine inspiration, even genius cannot venture 
to describe Christ except in general terms. 
Genius can give us but a glimpse of the 
glorious personality — yea, can but touch the 



174 New LigJit on the New Testament 

outer fringe of his robe. Whenever men, 
uninspired, endeavor to give the detailed 
portrait of Christ, they always fail. There is 
always some act, some expression, some tone 
in the utterance, that is out of keeping with 
the Christ we find portrayed in the New 
Testament. 

Indeed, it seems impossible for mere human 
genius to depict even a merely human ideal. 
George Eliot, with all her wonderful insight 
into character and skill in presenting it to her 
readers, yet fails when she tries to paint per- 
fection. Her Daniel Deronda is a failure, be- 
cause she tried to represent him as faultless.^ 
The result has been described, on account of 
the indefiniteness of the portraiture, as a 
" moral mist " instead of a man. 

How different it is with the writers of the 
New Testament ! They do not deal in mere 
generalities and indefinite expressions such as 
lifting empires off their hinges, and turning 
the stream of the centuries. They do not 
merely tell us that he is the holiest and the 
mightiest, but let us see him doing deeds and 
speaking words and exhibiting a spirit, which 
make us feel that he is. While they never 
satisfy a vulgar curiosity about his person — 

^ The Church's One Foundation, pp. 94, 95. 



Many Lights from Many Lands 175 

never even giving a hint about his personal 
appearance — ^yet they tell us definitely what he 
did, what he said, and sometimes, with what 
gesture or look he spoke. We catch utterances 
of the greatest beauty and sublimity and 
force, and yet never think of him as merely a 
great poet or great orator. He exhibits the 
highest order of courage, endurance, and self- 
command, and yet we never think of him as 
merely the greatest of heroes. He does deeds 
and speaks words of unspeakable kindness, 
and yet we never think of him as merely the 
greatest philanthropist. We always feel, as 
we look at this portraiture on the pages of the 
evangelists, that there is in him something far, 
yea infinitely, above all this. When we be- 
hold him a new-born infant we feel that we 
must bow in worship with the wise men and 
the shepherds. When we see him as a youth, 
with the doctors, we cannot but wonder at 
his wisdom ; and in the synagogue at Nazareth, 
the wonder at the gracious words which pro- 
ceeded out of his mouth, which his own towns- 
folk felt, is still felt by us as we read. 
Whether with authority, he teaches the peo- 
ple, or with unflinching courage, exposes and 
rebukes the hypocrisy of the scribes and 
Pharisees, or with tenderness, forgives the 



176 New Light on the New Testament 

woman who was a sinner, or in lowliness, 
receives sinners and eats with them, or stoops 
to wash his disciples' feet, we feel that here is 
one different from all other men. Whether 
we see him calming the sea, or filling the net 
with fishes, or feeding the multitudes, or re- 
calling the dead to life, or bearing the stripes 
and the thorn-crowning, or hanging on the 
cross, or rising from the tomb, or ascending 
to his Father, our hearts thrill with the im- 
pulse to adore, to worship, to love and serve 
him. It is this impulse, not momentary, but 
lasting through the ages, that sends the mis- 
sionaries across the seas and makes martyrs 
endure torture and death — that nerved a Paul 
to work and suffer and die in the first 
century, and Chinese Christians in the end of 
the nineteenth. 

Well might Irenaeus speak of these writings 
as those " in which Christ is enthroned," and 
well may Robertson Nicoll say that " what is 
needed is that we should find out for ourselves, 
in patient study, the Christ of the gospels, not 
the Christ of The Institutes^ or the Christ of 
The Imitation^ or the Christ of modern bio- 
graphies ; " and well may he say of the won- 
derful narrative of these gospels, " What 
stones the building is made of we cannot tell. 



Many Lights from Many Lands 177 

One thing is certain. Not only does it contain 
a true history, but it is a house not made with 
hands/' ^ 

Yes, the person is divine and the portraiture 
is divine. Whenever we see Christ — from the 
manger to the mount of the ascension — the 
Adeste fideles is our call to all that love him ; 
and our very hearts cry out, >' O come, let us 
adore him ! " 

''Wherefore God also hath highly exalted 
him, . . . that at the name of Jesus every 
knee should bow, of things in heaven, and 
things in earth, and things under the earth ; 
and that every tongue should confess that 
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the 
Father." 

But the icorlt which Christ has done and is 
doing in the world, through his gospel 
recorded in the New Testament, is a proof 
that the record is true and divine — '' the 
record, that God hath given ... in his 
son." Not only are the secondary effects 
wonderful, so that Christendom and civilization 
are practically coterminous, but there is a 
greater proof : In millions of human beings — 
millions multiplying as the ages pass — a work 
is progressing through which each one is des- 

^ The Church's One Foundation, by W. Robertson NicoU. 



178 New Light on the New Testament 

tined to shine forth as the sun in the kingdom 
he has founded and is bringing to its perfec- 
tion. The process, in its different stages, is 
seen in every community, every household, 
every individual, that has truly received his 
gospel ; and is to the world, looking on, a 
proof of its truth and divine efficacy. The 
world beholds sinful men becoming holy, and, 
lighted with wisdom from on high, walking as 
children of light. 

But the fullest and most joyful proof is 
reserved for the illumined and the saved, 
themselves. These, and these only, can say 
that " God, who commanded the light to shine 
out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to 
give the light of the knowledge of the glory 
of God in the face of Jesus Christ." Each of 
these, and these only, can use Paul's words : 
"I know him whom I have believed, and I am 
persuaded that he is able to guard that which 
I have committed unto him against that day." 

May we all know thee, the only true 
God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast 

SENT. 



APPENDIX 



NOTE 1 

Justin Martyr's Use of the Gospels 

1 Apology, Ch. xv 

* ' What Christ Himself taught " — 

"Concerning chastity he uttered such sentiments as 
these: * Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her 
hath committed adultery with her already in his heart before 
God.'" 

* ' And, ' If thy right eye offend thee, cut it out, for it is 
better for thee to enter into the kingdom of heaven with 
one eye than having two eyes to be cast into everlasting 
fire.''' 

" And, * Whosoever shall marry her that is divorced from 
another husband committeth adultery.' " 

''And, 'There are some who have made themselves 
eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake; but all cannot 
receive this saying. ' So that, all, who by human law, are 
twice married, are in the eye of our Master sinners, and 
those who look upon a woman to lust after her. For not 
only he who in acts commits adultery is rejected by him, 
but also he who desires to commit adultery ; since not only 
our works, but also our thoughts, are open before God. 
And many, both men and women, who have been Christ's 
disciples from childhood, remain pure at the age of sixty or 
seventy years; and I boast that I could produce such from 
every race of men. For, what shall I say, too, of the count- 
less multitude of those who have reformed intemperate 
habits and learned these things ? For Christ called not the 

179 



180 Appendix 

just nor the chaste to repentance, but the ungodly and the 
licentious and the unjust, his words being, ' I came not to 
call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.' For the 
heavenly Father desires rather the repentance than the 
punishment of the sinner." 

"And of our love to all he taught thus: * If ye love them 
that love you what new thing do ye ? For even fornicators 
do this. But I say unto you, pray for your enemies, and 
love them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully 
use you. ' ' ' 

"And that we should communicate to the needy and do 
nothing for glory, he said: 'Give to him that asketh, and 
from him that would borrow turn not away; for if ye lend 
to them of whom ye hope to receive, what new thing do ye? 
Even the publicans do this. Lay not up for yourselves 
treasure upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and 
where robbers break through, but lay up for yourselves 
treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth cor- 
rupt. For, what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole 
world and lose his own soul ? or what shall a man give in 
exchange for it ? Lay up treasure, therefore, where neither 
moth nor rust doth corrupt. ' ' ' 

"And, 'Be ye kind and merciful, as your Father also is 
kind and merciful, and maketh his sun to rise on sinners 
and the righteous and the wicked. Take no thought what 
ye shall eat or what ye shall put on. Are ye not better 
than the birds and the beasts? And God feedeth them. 
Take no thought, therefore, what ye shall eat or what ye 
shall put on; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye 
have need of these things. But seek ye the kingdom of 
heaven, and all these things shall be added unto you. For 
where his treasure is, there also is the mind of man.' " 

' ' And, ' Do not these things to be seen of men ; other- 
wise, ye have no reward of your father which is in 
heaven.' " 



Appendix 181 

One who can read this one chapter of the first Apology^ 
and say that Justin did not make use of our gospels must 
either be demented or possessed of a hardihood truly 
sublime. 

NOTE 2 
Early Use of the Gospel of John 

Basilides, the Gnostic (a. d. 125), is found quoting the 
Gospel of John : ' ' That which is said in the gospels : (to 
kzjoixv^o'j h ToT? ^hayyeXioi^^ He was the true light which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the world. " Hippo- 
lytus' Refutation of all Heresies^ vii, 10. 

Aeyofievov had just been used by Basilides in quoting 
Genesis 1: 3, and is used evidently as the equivalent of 
yeypaTzlat, See Ante-Nicene Fathers^ Vol. V, p. 7. Note. 

As to the use of the Gospel of John by Polycarp, Papias, 
Polycrates and other very early writers, which many at- 
tempt to explain away by a multitude of suppositions and 
assumptions, Bishop Lightfoot has this to say : — 

''By a sufficient number of assumptions which lie beyond 
the range of verification, the evidence may be set aside. 
But the early existence and recognition of the Fourth Gospel 
is the one simple postulate that explains all the facts. The 
law of gravitation accounts for the various phenomena of 
motion— the falling of a stone, the jet of a fountain, the 
orbits of the planets, etc. It is quite possible for anyone, 
who is disposed, to reject this explanation of nature. Pro- 
vided that he is allowed to postulate a new force for every 
new fact with which he is confronted, he has nothing to fear. 
He will then 

* gird the sphere 
With centric and concentric scribbled o'er, 
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb,' 

happy in his immunity. But the other theory will prevail, 
nevertheless, by reason of its simplicity. ' ^ 



182 Appendix 

NOTE 3 

The Lewis Palimpsest and the New Testament 

Text 

It is beside the purpose of this little book to enter into 
any extended discussion of the textual characteristics of the 
Lewis palimpsest or of any of the documents mentioned. 
Yet I cannot refrain from suggesting that, while our reliance 
for the true text must be mainly upon the great uncials, yet 
in cases where they present insuperable difficulties, and 
where we find those difficulties removed by this palimpsest 
which may be the very earliest of all versions, and therefore 
made from Greek manuscripts much earlier than any to 
which we have access, its testimony is not to be despised — 
nay is rather to be welcomed and trusted. Two cases which 
appear to me to be of this kind are Matt. 27 : 9 and 
John 18 : 28. 

The Lewis palimpsest omits '* Jeremiah " in the first, and 
in the second reads thus : * ' But they went not into the 
judgment-hall, that they should not be defiled whilst they 
were eating the unleavened bread." The acceptance of 
these texts relieves two difficulties— the attributing (in our 
received text) of a quotation from Zechariah to Jeremiah 
(in Matthew 27 : 9), and confusion as to the time of eating 
the passover by Christ and his apostles (in John 18 : 28). 

The Diatessaron, also, omits "Jeremiah," but has "pass- 
over " in John 18 : 28. The Lewis palimpsest furnishes the 
explanation, making the word "passover" here mean the 
feast of the passover — unleavened bread. 

NOTE 4 

The Date of the Apology of Aeistides 

Professor Harris is inclined to think that the Apology was 

not presented to Hadrian on the occasion named, but either 

to Hadrian and Antoninus Pius during the few months in 

A. D. 138 when they were colleagues, or to Antoninus 



Appendix 183 

alone, after the death of Hadrian. The sign of the plural 
with the word *' majesty^' and with the Syriac adjectives 
for ''venerable and merciful," as well as the imperatives 
' ' take and read ' ' would incline him to believe that it was 
addressed to the two emperors, but for the fact that the 
address ' ' O king ' ' occurs constantly in the Apology in the 
Syriac as well as in the Greek and the Armenian. This in- 
clines him to believe that these plurals are erroneous and 
that the Apology was probably addressed to Antoninus Pius 
alone after the death of Hadrian. 

In such a case we can only weigh, as best we may, the 
probabilities. 

We know, for one thing, that it is not unusual to find in- 
terpolations and other changes in writings of the second cen- 
tury, especially in translations. This Syriac copy of the 
Apology abounds in them, and if we make the not improba- 
ble supposition that this second address and the plurals 
named are of this character, then there is absolutely nothing 
to keep us from believing that the Apology was addressed to 
Hadrian in the eighth year of his reign. 

The first address of this Syriac copy, it must be remem- 
bered, is ''Here follows the defense which Aristides the 
philosopher made hefore Hadrian the king on behalf of rever- 
ence for God," while that of the Armenian fragment reads 
' ' To the Emperor Caesar Hadrian from Aristides. ' ' The 
address is not in the Greek because of its incorporation in 
the story of Barlaam and Josaphat; but it begins, "I, O 
King," etc., the original Greek thus showing that it was 
addressed to only one sovereign. 

To accept the conclusion of Professor Harris, in the words of 
the Introduction to the Apology of Aristides in the Ante-Nicene 
Fathers^ " requires us to suppose that Eusebius was wrong ; 
that Jerome copied his error; [and it must be remembered 
that Jerome says that it was extant in his day, and his de- 
scription of it would seem to indicate his personal knowl- 



184 Appendix 

edge of it] that the Armenian version curiously fell into the 
same mistake; and that the Syriac translation is, at this 
point, exceptionally faithful. " 

Now, it is extremely improbable that Eusebius who states 
that it was presented to Hadrian, should have been mistaken 
in this case. The Apology was well known in his day, and 
copies of it seem to have been abundant — ''preserved by a 
great number even to the present day, ' ' are his words. But, 
what would seem fairly decisive, he tells us that he had in 
his hands the Apology of Aristides' companion apologist, 
Quadratus. He must have seen with his own eyes to whom 
this was addressed, and he says it was Hadrian. 

Besides, ' ' a hearer of the apostles ' ' as Quadratus is said 
to have been, could hardly have lived long after A. D. 124-6. 

In addition to this, the character of the Apology indicates 
its early origin. 

Dr. Harris himself gives the following view of the indica- 
tions as to the date of the Apology in its style and contents : 

' ' The simplicity of the style of the Apology is in favor of 
an early date. The religious ideas and practices are of an 
antique cast. The ethics show a remarkable continuity with 
Jewish ethics : the care for the stranger and the friendless, 
the burial of the dead, and the like, are given as characteristic 
virtues both of Judaism and Christianity. Indeed we may 
say that one of the surprising things about the Apology is 
the friendly tone in which the Jews are spoken of. One cer- 
tainly would not suspect that the chasm between the Church 
and the Synagogue had become as practically impassable 
as we find it in the middle of the second century. There is 
no sign of the hostility to the Jews which we find in the 
3fartyrdom of Polycarp, and nothing like the severity of con- 
tempt which we find in the Epistle to Diognetus. If the 
Church is not, in the writer's time, under the wing of the 
Synagogue, it apparently has no objection to taking the 
Synagogue occasionally under its own wing. 



Appendix 185 

" Such a consideration seems to be a mark of antiquity, 
and one would, therefore, prefer to believe, if it were pos- 
sible, that the Apology was earlier than the revolt under 
Bar-Cocheba. ' ' {Texts and Studies^ vol. i, No. 1, p. 13.) 

The editor of Cambridge Texts and Studies^ Dr. J. Armi- 
tage Eobinson, thinks it entirely "possible " to believe it, in 
spite of the second title, in view of the fact that the trans- 
lator of the Greek Apology into Syriac has dealt very freely 
with his original, expunging some things, and adding so 
many others that the Syriac occupies half as much space 
again as the Greek. He says in his appendix {Texts and 
Studies, vol. i, No. 1, p. 75, note) : ** Mr. Harris inclines to 
accept this second title as the true one ; but the course of 
the present argument tends to show that the Syriac trans- 
lator has introduced many arbitrary changes on his own ac- 
count : and this makes me more unwilling to accept his 
testimony as against that of the Armenian version, which 
has, moreover, the explicit statement of Eusebius to support 
it." 

He also notes the fact that the Armenian fragment shows 
a much closer correspondence with the original Greek than 
does the Syriac where the two merely translate. * ' The ex- 
plicit statement of Eusebius ' ' in his Chronicon is thus given 
by Dr. Harris : — 

** 1. The Armenian version of the Chronicon gives under 
the year A. D. 124, as follows : — 

01. A. abr. Imp. Rom. 

d226 2140 8e 

dAdrianus Eleusinarum verum gnarus fuit multaque 
(dona) Atheniensium largitus est. 

eRomanorum ecclesise episcopatum excipit septimus 
Telesphorus annis XL 

* ' Codratus, apostolorum auditor, et Aristides, nostri 
dogmatis (nostrse vei) philosophus atheniensis, dedere 
apologeticas (apologise, responsiouis) ob mandatum. " The 



186 Appendix 

occasion and the substance of the mandate concerning the 
Christians, the '^ Rescript of Hadrian," is then given. 

Dr. Armitage Robinson gives very clearly the evidence 
that "the Armenian version is not made from the Syriac 
version in its present form ; " and remarks that " similar 
arguments could be adduced if there were any necessity, to 
show that the Syriac version is independent of the 
Armenian. ' ' 

The Armenian version, then, is an independent authority 
for the address to Hadian alone. 

Dr. Robinson shows the unreliableness of the Syriac ver- 
sion by comparing it with a Syriac version of the Oratio ad 
Grsecos ascribed to Justin, in which he says, ' ' Variation be- 
gins to show itself immediately after the first sentence. ' ' 
In this Oratio he shows, too, how the Syriac translator in- 
serted particulars not in the original, evidently to vaunt his 
independent knowledge. A similar attempt seems to have 
been made by the Syriac translator of the Apologi/y or a 
copyist, in inserting the duplicate address, possibly because 
of a tradition that it was presented to Antoninus Pius after 
its presentation to Hadrian.^ 

Dr. Harris notes a serious error in punctuation in the first 
sentence of the Syriac and is inclined to think that the sign 
of the plural is a mistake, expressing the opinion that the 
Apology was addressed to Antoninus Pius alone, after 
Hadrian's reign. In order to make this consistent with the 
fact that Quadratus delivered an Apology at the same time, 
he has either to identify Quadratus with a bishop of Athens 
of that name who flourished about 170, or, else, to suppose 
that the two Apologies were delivered at different times to 
different emperors. 

I think all will agree that the evidence, both from the 

^"If . . . = * Renewed, or dedicated again to . . . 
Antoninus Pius,' could be read, both headings might be 
retained." — Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. ix, p. 263, note. 



Appendix 187 

clear statements of Eusebius and from the documents 
themselves, is reasonably conclusive that Aristides, an Athe- 
nian philosopher, and Quadratus, an '' auditor ajjostolorum,^^ 
delivered their Apologies to Hadrian at Athens in the eighth 
year of his reign, A. D. 124-126. The other view requires 
too many improbable suppositions and readjustments to 
make it at all credible. 

NOTE 5 

The New Testament and the Classics 
The great advantages we enjoy for determining the text 
of the New Testament may be seen when we remember the 
vast number of quotations from it by writers of the second 
and third centuries, the large number of versions of it in 
several languages and the manj^ early manuscripts of it 
which still exist. The case of the Latin and Greek classics 
presents a marked contrast, as the following extract from the 
curator of manuscripts in the British Museum, Frederic 
George Kenyon, D. Lit., Ph. D., will show : '^ But of the 
classics we have no original autographs, nor any copies 
nearly contemporaneous with them. The intervals which 
separate the composition of the great classics from the date of 
the earliest extant manuscripts of them must be numbered 
by hundreds, and sometimes by thousands of years. The 
plays of ^schylus were written between 485 and 450 B, c. 
and the earliest extant manuscript of them (a few unimpor- 
tant scraps excepted) was written in the eleventh century — 
an interval of some 1,500 years. For Sophocles, for Thucyd- 
ides, for Herodotus, the interval is substantially the same; 
for Pindar and Euripides it extends to 1,600 years. For 
Plato, we have interesting fragments of two of his dialogues 
written only a century after his death ; but for the greater 
part of his works we are dependent on manuscripts eleven 
hundred years later. Aristotle (except for his recently re- 
covered history of the Athenian Constitution) is in a similar 



188 Appendix 

case ; the earliest manuscript of the Ethics was written in 
the tenth century, while for the Politics we have no com- 
plete copy earlier than the fourteenth. We are better off in 
regard to some of the Latin writers. Virgil, who died 19 
B. c, is represented by several manuscripts which may be 
assigned to the fifth century, or even to the fourth ; consid- 
erable portions of Livy exist in copies of the fifth and sixth 
centuries ; there is a precious (though badly damaged) manu- 
script of Plautus which belongs to the fourth century ; while 
there are fragments of Cicero which may go back to an even 
earlier date. But, for Tacitus, we have an interval of 750 
years before we reach our earliest copy of him ; for Horace and 
Lucretius, 900 years ; while in the case of Catullus the most 
spontaneously poetic spirit in all the literature of Rome, we 
are dependent upon a few manuscripts written nearly 1,450 
years after his death. It is worth while to note, in passing, 
how greatly superior in respect of antiquity of attestation is 
the Greek Testament. The shortest interval which sepa- 
rates any classical author from any substantial manuscript 
of his works is some 400 years, while in the majority of 
cases, it ranges from 1,000 to 1,500 years ; but of the New 
Testament we have complete copies within 250 years of the 
date at which many of the books composing it were written." 

Again he says, ' ' Virgil is the only classical author whose 
text is on the same footing as that of the New Testament, it 
being mainly based on uncial manuscripts. There are three 
substantially complete manuscripts of Virgil written in 
capitals (which differ from uncials only in being of squarer 
and stiff er formation). Besides these, there are three im- 
perfect manuscripts in the same style ; and though this 
amount of uncial evidence is incomparably less than in the 
case of the New Testament, it is much greater than is found 
in any other classical writer." — From article in Harper'' s 
Magazine^ August, 1902, on The Lineage of the Classics. 

The advantage of the New Testament in the matter of 



Appendix 189 

manuscripts could hardly be better stated in a few words 
than we find it given in the following extract : — 

'' A few precious copies written on vellum or parchment 
have come down to us from a very early period, the most 
important of which are (1) the Vatican, styled Codex B, 
preserved in the Vatican Library at Kome, and dating from 
the fourth century ; (2) the Sinaitic Codex discovered 
by Tischendorf in St. Catherine Convent at the foot of Mt. 
Sinai in 1859, now deposited at St. Petersburg, likewise of 
the fourth century ; (3) the Alexandrine (Codex A), pre- 
served in the British Museum, and dating from the fifth 
century. These, and other ancient manuscripts to the num- 
ber of about a hundred are called Uncials, because written 
with capital letters without any separation between the 
words — the others of a more modern character being called 
Cursives, because written in a running hand. Of the latter 
there are about two thousand, an immense array of wit- 
nesses compared with the few manuscripts of classical works 
preserved to us, which can generally be counted on the ten 
fingers." — McGlymont's New Testament and its writers, small 
ed., pp. 2, 3. 

The author does not mention Codex D (Codex Bezse), now 
brought into special prominence by Nestle, Harris and 
others. 

In a later article in the same magazine (Nov. 1902), Mr. 
Kenyon says : — 

* • We owe our knowledge of most of the great works of 
Greek and Latin literature — ^schylus, Sophocles, Thucyd- 
ides, Horace, Lucretius, Tacitus, and many more — to manu- 
scripts written from 900 to 1,500 years after their authors' 
deaths ; while of the New Testament we have two excellent 
and approximately complete copies at an interval of only 
250 years. Again, of the classical writers we have as a 
rule, only a few score of copies (often less), of which one or 
two stand out as decisively superior to the rest ; but of the 



190 Appendix 

New Testament we have more than 3,000 copies (besides the 
very large number of versions), and many of these have dis- 
tinct and independent value." 

Bnt the versions, in various languages, form a valuable 
source of information as to the original text of the New 
Testament. ' ' In spite of the ravages of time, more than 
three thousand copies of the Greek New Testament, whole 
or in part, still exist ; and to these must be added the copies 
of the early translations into other languages — Syriac, Coptic, 
Armenian, Gothic, Latin, etc. — which give invaluable assist- 
ance to the scholar in ascertaining the correct text of the 
Scriptures. ' ' 

Besides all this, early Christian writings which have come 
down to us with the words of the New Testament imbedded 
and preserved in them not only prove the existence of it in 
their day, but indicate its text. It has been asserted by a 
competent scholar that he has found by personal examina- 
tion two-thirds of the New Testament in the extant remnant 
of the Greek writings of Origen alone, as one instance. This 
source of evidence is almost entirely lacking in the case of 
the classics. 



NOTE 6 

The So-Called Gospel Accokding to the Hebrews 
Some readers may wish to know more about the so-called 
Gospel according to the Hebrews^ as a certain class of scholars 
are disposed to urge its claims to something like equality 
with the canonical gospels, while some infidels, as we have 
seen, assert its priority in date to all of them. 

An article in the Biblical World for September, 1902, 
claims that it was identical with the Hebrew Logia of Mat- 
thew mentioned by Papias (about A. D 140), who says, as 
quoted by Eusebius (H. E. Ill, xxxix.), "Matthew com- 
posed his history in the Hebrew dialect, and every one 



Appendix 191 

translated it as he was able." The writer represents this as 
the view of most modern scholars. 

As we have seen above, Dr. Bernhard Weiss unhesitat- 
ingly affirms that it has no connection with this work 
(which Hilgenfeld and many other scholars think never 
really existed except in the misguided imagination of the 
weak-minded Papias) and shows that the fragments of the 
Gospel according to the Hebrews are taken from the three 
synoptic gospels, while there are evident traces of the gos- 
pel of John in words or expressions peculiar to that gospel 
— all being changed, of course, to sustain the views of the 
Ebionites or the Nazarenes who used them. The same pas- 
sages vary much in different recensions of this so-called 
gospel, as is shown especially in the different accounts given 
in different copies quoted by Epiphanius and Jerome. It 
should be remembered that our synoptic gospels were over 
three hundred years old when the Gospel of the Hebrews was 
quoted by Epiphanius, and still older when quoted by 
Jerome, so that the heretics of these centuries had had 
ample time to manipulate and change them according to 
their various or changing ideas. The differences in the ac- 
counts of the baptism of Christ and the descent of the Holy 
Spirit upon him show this with special clearness. By this 
time, too, these errorists had set up the claim that the Gos- 
pel according to the Hebrews was the work of the apostle 
Matthew. 

Now, the discovery of the Diatessaron of Tatian and the 
Lewis palimpsest of the four gospels has made the whole 
matter plain ; and strange to say, the writer of the article 
in the Biblical World does not mention these discoveries at 
all. If, throughout the Diatessaron^ composed soon after 
A. D. 150, our four gospels alone are used — and this is the 
case — then there is the proof that they and they alone were 
the gospels of the Christian world at that period, just as 
Irenseus testifies that they were in his time, fii ty years later. 



192 Appendix 

The Lewis palimpsest, too, has our four gospels alone. If 
the Diatessaron and the palimpsest had contained the pe- 
culiar readings of the Gospel according to the Helrews^ a cer- 
tain class of critics would have been jubilant. Now, they 
are entirely silent about these discoveries and act as if they 
had nothing to do with the matter, when, in fact, they pre- 
sent the clearest proof that our gospels alone were the gos- 
pels of the Christian world during the half century after the 
death of the last of the apostles. Nicholson, who wrote his 
elaborate treatise on the Gospel according to the Hebrews be- 
fore these discoveries were made, used great diligence in 
gathering and arranging the thirty fragments which he 
thought certainly belonged to this so-called gospel, together 
with thirty-four others which he thought probably or possi- 
bly belonged to it. But when he comes to marshaling these 
fragments and interpreting their peculiarities in the en- 
deavor to sustain his theory that Matthew wrote, at one 
time, the Hebrew Gospel (which Nicholson identifies with 
this Gospel according to the Hebrews), and at another time, 
our canonical Greek Matthew, he reminds one much more of 
an adept in the arts of legerdemain than of a sober reasoner. 
The legitimate conclusion from the facts which he adduces 
is that which is made clear by the discovery of the Diatessa- 
ron and the palimpsest — namely, that the Gospel according 
to the Hebrews is a heretical document drawn from our gos- 
pels, with additions, omissions and changes of text, and not 
recognized by the Christian Church at the middle of the 
second century. 



NOTE 7 

Haenack's Honest Acknowledgment 

In a review of Dr. Armitage Robinson's book, The Study 
of the GospelSy The Churchmany London, has this to say 
(Sep., 1902): — 



Appendix 193 

**He [Dr. Eobinson], mentions moreover, that Dr. Har- 
nack, in sending to him his own Chronology of Early Chris- 
tian Literature^ in which he 'approximates to the older 
views, ' wrote that ' he hoped that, as to its main positions, 
we should find ourselves in agreement, and that differences 
would henceforward appear in the interpretation of the 
books rather than in the problems of their date and authen- 
ticity. ' 

"It is, in fact, an immense gain to the Christian argu- 
ment that the most distinguished ecclesiastical scholar in 
Germany has substantially admitted the truth of the tradi- 
tion of the Church respecting the dates, and to a great ex- 
tent, the authorship of the books of the New Testament. 
The German criticism, which, toward the end of the last 
century, used to be thrown at the heads of ' Apologists ' in 
England by such controversialists as the late Professor Hux- 
ley, is now acknowledged in Germany itself — in Berlin itself 
— to have been mistaken ; and the result of the controversy 
for fifty years is the rehabilitation, in the most important 
points, of the ancient Christian tradition." 



MAR 21 1903 



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